There’s a saying—or maybe a truism—that the test of any new technology lies in its ability to reproduce pornography. Long ago, pornography was the stuff of private collections: crude figurines and drawings that spread their influence only as far as they could be carried. But man could not live in this wilderness forever. He had opposable thumbs and pressing needs, and thus were born woodblock printing, engraving, movable type, daguerreotype, halftone printing, photography, the moving image. Man needed these innovations, of course, to spread the great truths of God, nature, king, and country. But it was never very long before some guy wandered into the workroom of the newest inventor, took a look at his gizmo, and thought, You know what I could use that for?  

Down through the ages, one thing united these mass-produced forms of pornography: the understanding that no matter how exciting, they were always and only a pale imitation of the real thing. Any traveling salesman who checked into a motel with his copy of Playboy would rather have had a human being on his arm.

But then the internet arrived.

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Where would this take us? Well, now we know. The heterosexual man can now have what many see as a rich sex life without ever needing to deal with an actual woman.

There are men who have fallen in love with sex dolls, the way toddlers fall in love with teddy bears, although for children the toy is a transitional object. Early this month, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that AI-powered sex robots aren’t far away from the U.S. market: “less than five years probably.” They will be able to provide everything except human connection, and what is that anyway? Human relationships, especially between the sexes, are fraught with diverging interests and needs, and when you get right down to it, aren’t women kind of a drag? With their talk-talk-talk and their dinner parties, and their pouting about laundry that never gets washed the right way? Your sex robot won’t do that. She’ll never make you go apple picking. She will do only what you want to do.

Sex has the ability to create or strengthen a bond between people, and—no matter how many precautions you might take against this terrible outcome—you could find yourself emotionally attached to a person you have sex with. Before online porn, men had an obvious incentive to put up with the stress of dating, and they developed the social skills necessary to close the deal: enough resilience to ask a woman out, and then a second woman, if the first one rejected them; the drive to locate a clean shirt; and the skill to make conversation over two orders of chicken piccata. It could be awkward; it could be a nightmare. But whether the resulting attachment lasted half a century or a single week, one thing was certain: While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans.

But who needs to spiff up now? Porn will never reject you or look at you with a pitying gaze. It’s always there, it never disappoints, and you never have to dig through the clothes hamper for something that smells okayish. As Michael says in The Boys in the Band, one good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to look your best.

Watching online porn has become most adolescents’ first sexual experience. The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hard-core porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War. (Probably a good thing, because we really needed to win that one.) Because of the internet’s power to desensitize people and wear down their natural responses to shocking things, and because of the way these algorithms work, young people quickly proceed to more and more extreme videos, and—as it has always been—these earliest experiences of sexual events pass deeply into their sense of what sex should be.

You can’t spend 15 minutes scrolling through a porn site without coming across a video in which a woman seems to be not performing fear or pain, but actually experiencing those things. If you’re one of those people who enjoy watching coerced sex, you’ll never be bored for a second of your life. As far as the moral equations of watching porn go, the one that matters is: Are you excited by the obvious abuse of women, or have you learned to countenance that abuse as a necessary cost of your own pleasure? And which of those is worse?

We’re talking about a private, individual experience. Could that have an impact on society? Surely it does. When straight men don’t need women for sex, a question starts to form: What do they need them for? If it’s having children, these men are going to have to surface out in the world and meet some women, even if they think that means settling for second-best sex. Someone whose adolescence has been spent using a phone and laptop for sex probably isn’t skilled in making conversation with actual women, which will be a problem if he decides to get out among the apple pickers.

The porn-first man tends to be an Andrew Tate kind of guy. Former kickboxer, chancellor of Hustlers University, early-episode rejectee from Big Brother (he said a video of him whipping a woman with a belt had been edited to take out the humor and fun of the moment), he’s an influencer and the current president of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. He spent the past two years in Romania after he was accused of rape and human trafficking, but late last month was allowed to travel to the freedom of the United States, only to land in the flypaper of Florida, where he is now the subject of another criminal investigation. (He has denied any wrongdoing.)

Tate is charismatic and mesmerizing, a perfect companion to the lonely masturbator. You’re not a loser; you’re a king! He provides hours and hours of online content warning men that women are trying to emasculate them. What he’s gesturing to is an old idea, probably more true than not: that it’s in society’s best interest for men to couple off with women, because women civilize men. When confronted with that notion, women reject it: Their job isn’t to civilize men. When men see the same adage, they feel uncomfortable (what man wants to be “civilized” by another person, especially by a woman?).

But men taught that women are “barely sentient,” there to be used and abused, will likely spend their lives alone.

The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price.

The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water.

In October 1970, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, warned against the suppression of literature, which helps preserve national memory and truth, and appealed to artists and writers to stand against oppressive governments and violent acts and extravagant lies.

“The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing,” the man who had spent nearly a decade in the labor camps of the Gulag told a complacent world. “The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.”

Solzhenitsyn had served time in Russian prison and labor camps for having criticized Josef Stalin in correspondence with a school friend. He declined to attend the prize-giving ceremony himself, for fear of not being allowed to return to the Soviet Union. (His new wife was expecting their first child.) The text of the address, portions of which are below, was secretly sent to Stockholm and published in 1972.

Writers and artists, Solzhenitsyn said, would conquer falsehoods in the end. The “nakedness of violence” would be “revealed in all its ugliness.” And one word of truth would “outweigh the whole world.” His admonition and courage and confidence were needed then, including in Russia; they are needed now, even in America. The “fog of lies” can envelop even shining cities on hills.

—Peter Wehner

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up—a strange cast-up from the ocean?—something unearthed from the sands?—or an obscure object fallen down from the sky?—intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.

So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement—right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another— grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel—for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

But shall we ever grasp the whole of that light? Who will dare to say that he has DEFINED Art, enumerated all its facets? Perhaps once upon a time someone understood and told us, but we could not remain satisfied with that for long; we listened, and neglected, and threw it out there and then, hurrying as always to exchange even the very best—if only for something new! And when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it.

One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today’s ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public.

Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God’s heaven; then, however, his responsibility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence—in destitution, in prison, in sickness—his sense of stable harmony never deserts him.

But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings—they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist’s vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers.

Archaeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it?

And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die— art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities?

Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited—dimly, briefly—by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.

Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see —not yourself—but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan …

One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes—but whom has it saved?

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition—and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.

In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force— they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three?

In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.

And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?

It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today.

In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, a platform offered to far from every writer and only once in a lifetime, I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps, but hundreds and even thousands of them; unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others— perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I—have perished. Of them, I myself met but a few on the Archipelago of GULAG, shattered into its fractionary multitude of islands; and beneath the millstone of shadowing and mistrust I did not talk to them all, of some I only heard, of others still I only guessed. Those who fell into that abyss already bearing a literary name are at least known, but how many were never recognized, never once mentioned in public? And virtually no one managed to return. A whole national literature remained there, cast into oblivion not only without a grave, but without even underclothes, naked, with a number tagged on to its toe. Russian literature did not cease for a moment, but from the outside it appeared a wasteland! Where a peaceful forest could have grown, there remained, after all the felling, two or three trees overlooked by chance.

And as I stand here today, accompanied by the shadows of the fallen, with bowed head allowing others who were worthy before to pass ahead of me to this place, as I stand here, how am I to divine and to express what THEY would have wished to say?

This obligation has long weighed upon us, and we have understood it. In the words of Vladimir Solov’ev:

Even in chains we ourselves must complete
That circle which the gods have mapped out for us.

Frequently, in painful camp seethings, in a column of prisoners, when chains of lanterns pierced the gloom of the evening frosts, there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear one of us. Then it seemed so clear: what our successful ambassador would say, and how the world would immediately respond with its comment. Our horizon embraced quite distinctly both physical things and spiritual movements, and it saw no lop-sidedness in the indivisible world. These ideas did not come from books, neither were they imported for the sake of coherence. They were formed in conversations with people now dead, in prison cells and by forest fires, they were tested against THAT life, they grew out of THAT existence.

When at last the outer pressure grew a little weaker, my and our horizon broadened and gradually, albeit through a minute chink, we saw and knew “the whole world”. And to our amazement the whole world was not at all as we had expected, as we had hoped; that is to say a world living “not by that”, a world leading “not there”, a world which could exclaim at the sight of a muddy swamp, “what a delightful little puddle!”, at concrete neck stocks, “what an exquisite necklace!”; but instead a world where some weep inconsolate tears and others dance to a light-hearted musical.

How could this happen? Why the yawning gap? Were we insensitive? Was the world insensitive? Or is it due to language differences? Why is it that people are not able to hear each other’s every distinct utterance? Words cease to sound and run away like water—without taste, colour, smell. Without trace.

As I have come to understand this, so through the years has changed and changed again the structure, content and tone of my potential speech. The speech I give today.

And it has little in common with its original plan, conceived on frosty camp evenings.

From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life. As the Russian saying goes, “Do not believe your brother, believe your own crooked eye.” And that is the most sound basis for an understanding of the world around us and of human conduct in it. And during the long epochs when our world lay spread out in mystery and wilderness, before it became encroached by common lines of communication, before it was transformed into a single, convulsively pulsating lump—men, relying on experience, ruled without mishap within their limited areas, within their communities, within their societies, and finally on their national territories. At that time it was possible for individual human beings to perceive and accept a general scale of values, to distinguish between what is considered normal, what incredible; what is cruel and what lies beyond the boundaries of wickedness; what is honesty, what deceit. And although the scattered peoples led extremely different lives and their social values were often strikingly at odds, just as their systems of weights and measures did not agree, still these discrepancies surprised only occasional travellers, were reported in journals under the name of wonders, and bore no danger to mankind which was not yet one.

But now during the past few decades, imperceptibly, suddenly, mankind has become one—hopefully one and dangerously one—so that the concussions and inflammations of one of its parts are almost instantaneously passed on to others, sometimes lacking in any kind of necessary immunity. Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us—in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world—this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.

And if there are not many such different scales of values in the world, there are at least several; one for evaluating events near at hand, another for events far away; aging societies possess one, young societies another; unsuccessful people one, successful people another. The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold—with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims—this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.

In one part of the world, not so long ago, under persecutions not inferior to those of the ancient Romans’, hundreds of thousands of silent Christians gave up their lives for their belief in God. In the other hemisphere a certain madman, (and no doubt he is not alone), speeds across the ocean to DELIVER us from religion—with a thrust of steel into the high priest! He has calculated for each and every one of us according to his personal scale of values!

That which from a distance, according to one scale of values, appears as enviable and flourishing freedom, at close quarters, and according to other values, is felt to be infuriating constraint calling for buses to be overthrown. That which in one part of the world might represent a dream of incredible prosperity, in another has the exasperating effect of wild exploitation demanding immediate strike. There are different scales of values for natural catastrophes: a flood craving two hundred thousand lives seems less significant than our local accident. There are different scales of values for personal insults: sometimes even an ironic smile or a dismissive gesture is humiliating, while for others cruel beatings are forgiven as an unfortunate joke. There are different scales of values for punishment and wickedness: according to one, a month’s arrest, banishment to the country, or an isolation-cell where one is fed on white rolls and milk, shatters the imagination and fills the newspaper columns with rage. While according to another, prison sentences of twenty-five years, isolation-cells where the walls are covered with ice and the prisoners stripped to their underclothes, lunatic asylums for the sane, and countless unreasonable people who for some reason will keep running away, shot on the frontiers—all this is common and accepted. While the mind is especially at peace concerning that exotic part of the world about which we know virtually nothing, from which we do not even receive news of events, but only the trivial, out-of-date guesses of a few correspondents.

Yet we cannot reproach human vision for this duality, for this dumbfounded incomprehension of another man’s distant grief, man is just made that way. But for the whole of mankind, compressed into a single lump, such mutual incomprehension presents the threat of imminent and violent destruction. One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: we shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.

A man with two hearts is not for this world, neither shall we be able to live side by side on one Earth.

But who will co-ordinate these value scales, and how? Who will create for mankind one system of interpretation, valid for good and evil deeds, for the unbearable and the bearable, as they are differentiated today? Who will make clear to mankind what is really heavy and intolerable and what only grazes the skin locally? Who will direct the anger to that which is most terrible and not to that which is nearer? Who might succeed in transferring such an understanding beyond the limits of his own human experience? Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, constraint, scientific proof—all are useless. But fortunately there does exist such a means in our world! That means is art. That means is literature.

They can perform a miracle: they can overcome man’s detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain. From man to man, as he completes his brief spell on Earth, art transfers the whole weight of an unfamiliar, lifelong experience with all its burdens, its colours, its sap of life; it recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own.

And even more, much more than that; both countries and whole continents repeat each other’s mistakes with time lapses which can amount to centuries. Then, one would think, it would all be so obvious! But no; that which some nations have already experienced, considered and rejected, is suddenly discovered by others to be the latest word. And here again, the only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. They possess a wonderful ability: beyond distinctions of language, custom, social structure, they can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another. To an inexperienced nation they can convey a harsh national trial lasting many decades, at best sparing an entire nation from a superfluous, or mistaken, or even disastrous course, thereby curtailing the meanderings of human history.

It is this great and noble property of art that I urgently recall to you today from the Nobel tribune.

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation.

(In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.)

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin—interred alive throughout their lives—are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

In some cases moreover—when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety—it is a danger to the whole of mankind.

At various times and in various countries there have arisen heated, angry and exquisite debates as to whether art and the artist should be free to live for themselves, or whether they should be for ever mindful of their duty towards society and serve it albeit in an unprejudiced way. For me there is no dilemma, but I shall refrain from raising once again the train of arguments. One of the most brilliant addresses on this subject was actually Albert Camus’ Nobel speech, and I would happily subscribe to his conclusions. Indeed, Russian literature has for several decades manifested an inclination not to become too lost in contemplation of itself, not to flutter about too frivolously. I am not ashamed to continue this tradition to the best of my ability. Russian literature has long been familiar with the notions that a writer can do much within his society, and that it is his duty to do so.

Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but—reproach, beg, urge and entice him—that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane.

Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule—always do what’s most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down. As seen from the outside, the amplitude of the tossings of western society is approaching that point beyond which the system becomes metastable and must fall. Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing. Dostoevsky’s DEVILS—apparently a provincial nightmare fantasy of the last century—are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of; and by means of the hijackings, kidnappings, explosions and fires of recent years they are announcing their determination to shake and destroy civilization! And they may well succeed. The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: let us drive away THOSE cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we!), having laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it! . . . But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear “conservative”. Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called SLAVERY TO PROGRESSIVE QUIRKS.

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the Twentieth Century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people—and there are many in today’s world—elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today—and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)

And on top of this we are threatened by destruction in the fact that the physically compressed, strained world is not allowed to blend spiritually; the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to jump over from one half to the other. This presents a rampant danger: THE SUPPRESSION OF INFORMATION between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that suppression of information leads to entropy and total destruction. Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory; within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement, even simpler—to forget it, as though it had never really existed. (Orwell understood this supremely.) A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the Earth, but by an expeditionary corps from Mars; the people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the Earth and are prepared to go and trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as “liberators”.

A quarter of a century ago, in the great hopes of mankind, the United Nations Organization was born. Alas, in an immoral world, this too grew up to be immoral. It is not a United Nations Organization but a United Governments Organization where all governments stand equal; those which are freely elected, those imposed forcibly, and those which have seized power with weapons. Relying on the mercenary partiality of the majority UNO jealously guards the freedom of some nations and neglects the freedom of others. As a result of an obedient vote it declined to undertake the investigation of private appeals—the groans, screams and beseechings of humble individual PLAIN PEOPLE—not large enough a catch for such a great organization. UNO made no effort to make the Declaration of Human Rights, its best document in twenty-five years, into an OBLIGATORY condition of membership confronting the governments. Thus it betrayed those humble people into the will of the governments which they had not chosen.

It would seem that the appearance of the contemporary world rests solely in the hands of the scientists; all mankind’s technical steps are determined by them. It would seem that it is precisely on the international goodwill of scientists, and not of politicians, that the direction of the world should depend. All the more so since the example of the few shows how much could be achieved were they all to pull together. But no; scientists have not manifested any clear attempt to become an important, independently active force of mankind. They spend entire congresses in renouncing the sufferings of others; better to stay safely within the precincts of science. That same spirit of Munich has spread above them its enfeebling wings.

What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?

But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen. And if the tanks of his fatherland have flooded the asphalt of a foreign capital with blood, then the brown spots have slapped against the face of the writer forever. And if one fatal night they suffocated his sleeping, trusting Friend, then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his young fellow citizens breezily declare the superiority of depravity over honest work, if they give themselves over to drugs or seize hostages, then their stink mingles with the breath of the writer.

Shall we have the temerity to declare that we are not responsible for the sores of the present-day world?

However, I am cheered by a vital awareness of WORLD LITERATURE as of a single huge heart, beating out the cares and troubles of our world, albeit presented and perceived differently in each of its corners.

Apart from age-old national literatures there existed, even in past ages, the conception of world literature as an anthology skirting the heights of the national literatures, and as the sum total of mutual literary influences. But there occurred a lapse in time: readers and writers became acquainted with writers of other tongues only after a time lapse, sometimes lasting centuries, so that mutual influences were also delayed and the anthology of national literary heights was revealed only in the eyes of descendants, not of contemporaries.

But today, between the writers of one country and the writers and readers of another, there is a reciprocity if not instantaneous then almost so. I experience this with myself. Those of my books which, alas, have not been printed in my own country have soon found a responsive, worldwide audience, despite hurried and often bad translations. Such distinguished western writers as Heinrich Böll have undertaken critical analysis of them. All these last years, when my work and freedom have not come crashing down, when contrary to the laws of gravity they have hung suspended as though on air, as though on NOTHING—on the invisible dumb tension of a sympathetic public membrane; then it was with grateful warmth, and quite unexpectedly for myself, that I learnt of the further support of the international brotherhood of writers. On my fiftieth birthday I was astonished to receive congratulations from well-known western writers. No pressure on me came to pass by unnoticed. During my dangerous weeks of exclusion from the Writers’ Union the WALL OF DEFENCE advanced by the world’s prominent writers protected me from worse persecutions; and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably prepared a roof for me, in the event of my threatened exile being put into effect. Finally even the advancement of my name for the Nobel Prize was raised not in the country where I live and write, but by Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. And later still entire national writers’ unions have expressed their support for me.

Thus I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an “internal affair” falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: “No right to interfere in our internal affairs!” Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today—to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see.

Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language—the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit.

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the WHOLE WORLD: in the centre observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions.

And who, if not writers, are to pass judgement—not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one’s bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfied weakness? Who is to pass judgement on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives?

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness—and violence, decrepit, will fall.

That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life—but by going to war!

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

The Yiddish poet Chaim Grade survived World War II by fleeing his city, Vilna, now Vilnius, and wandering through the Soviet Union and its Central Asian republics. His wife and mother stayed behind and were murdered, probably in the Ponary forest outside Vilna, along with 75,000 others, mostly Jews. After the war, Grade moved to the United States and wrote some of the best novels in the Yiddish language, all woefully little known.

Before he left for America, however, he went back to Vilna, previously a center of Eastern European Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious life—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” In his memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days, he describes what he found there. The impossibility of conveying in ordinary Yiddish the experience of walking through the empty streets of one’s eradicated civilization pushes Grade into a biblical register. His mother’s home is intact, he writes, but cobwebs bar his entry “like the angels with flaming swords who barred Adam and Eve from returning to Eden.”

Later, he goes to the Synagogue Courtyard. With its impressive library, ritual bath, and houses of worship great and small, it was the Lithuanian Jerusalem’s functional equivalent of the Holy Temple. Now the courtyard lies in ruins, and in his anguish, Grade’s voice takes on the proclamatory cadences of a prophet. Not just any prophet but, I think, Ezekiel, the subject of an early poem of his. Ezekiel did his prophesying from exile before and after the destruction of the First Temple in the Babylonian conquest of 586 B.C.E., another defining cataclysm in Jewish history. In Ezekiel’s most famous vision, he sees a valley full of dried bones and, channeling the words of God, raises the bones, creating an army of the resurrected. Grade wouldn’t have encountered bones—the Nazis ordered Ponary’s corpses to be dug up and burned during the war—but from under the heaps of stones come prayers, “all the prayers that Jews have uttered for hundreds of years.” He hears them without hearing them, because what screams, he says, is the silence.

[Chris Heath: A secret diary of mass murder]

Grade was born in 1910, came to the U.S. in 1948, and died in New York in 1982; he devoted the second half of his life to re-​creating the universe wiped out in the first half. He turned to prose, a form better suited than poetry to inventorying the psychological and material conditions of a complex and divided society, and he developed an almost Flaubertian passion for detail. His main subjects were poor Jews—he himself grew up in a dark cellar behind a smithy—and the hermetic world of Lithuanian Misnagdic rabbis and their yeshivas, which relatively few Yiddish writers of the time knew or wrote much about. Scholarly and strict about Jewish law, Misnagdic Jews looked down on the anti-intellectual, antinomian mysticism of Hasidic Jews. If your image of Old World Jewry comes from Grade’s contemporary Isaac Bashevis Singer, with his kabbalists, dybbuks, and elaborate rabbinic courts, swap in Lithuanian Talmudists conducting self-critique and doing pilpul—close textual analysis—in spartan houses of study.

Grade’s father was a maskil, an intellectual who adhered to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, movement. But the general penury that followed World War I reduced him to working as a night watchman, and he died young, leaving Grade’s mother to support herself and Grade by selling fruit. She sent him to a yeshiva mostly because she could afford it, but also because she was devout. There he was trained in musar, a particularly rigorous—you might even say puritanical—strain of Misnagdic Judaism.

Grade studied rabbinics into his 20s, then turned secular and became a member of Young Vilna, a now-legendary group of leftist, modernist Yiddish writers. Although he never became a practicing Jew again, he didn’t turn against his teachers and their maximalist approach. On the contrary, Grade observes their fictional counterparts with a knowing, sometimes cynical, but always loving eye. He doesn’t ridicule them, at least not unduly, nor does he apologize on their behalf, and their single-minded pursuit of Torah can be inspiring.

Grade’s novels aren’t oracular, the way the section on postwar Vilna in his memoir was. But his ambition is still biblical. I don’t think the word overreaches. The Torah, thought to have been compiled over centuries in response to catastrophes and traumas, including that same Babylonian exile, is also a product of the impulse to preserve memories and knowledge all but lost in a calamity, lest the dispersed Jews forget who they’d been. Grade considered his undertaking a sort of holy assignment. “I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great generation that I knew,” he wrote in a letter in 1977.

Another striking feature of Grade’s fiction is that it almost never acknowledges the imminent annihilation of the world it so meticulously reconstructs—as if by ignoring that obscene fact, he could annul it. “The mission of his prose after the war is to undo the Holocaust through literature, if you can imagine such a thing,” the historian David Fishman, a friend of Grade’s and lifelong champion of his work, said at a 2012 conference on the writer at the Yiddish Book Center.

The risk writers run when they set out to memorialize is that they’ll produce memorials, not literature. Grade didn’t do that. His novels jam almost too much life into their pages. That’s not a criticism, because the streets of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe also jostled and overflowed; Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns. On the whole, they’re good people. They scheme and bicker and get on one another’s nerves, and yet they have deep family feeling, and few of his protagonists wholly free themselves from a yearning for contact with the divine. The dominant emotion in a Grade novel is tortured loyalty.

Sons and Daughters is Grade’s last novel, and the most recent of his fictional works to be translated and published. He wrote it in weekly installments that appeared in Yiddish newspapers, with intermittent interruptions, from 1965 to 1976. When he died a few years later, Grade had adapted some of the columns into the first volume of a novel, but hadn’t finished the second. Neither the first nor the uncompleted second volume saw the light of day until they were brought out this year as a single novel in an English translation by Rose Waldman.

Sons and Daughters unfolds during the early 1930s, primarily in shtetls in what was then Poland and is now mostly Lithuania and Belarus. It tells the stories of two families of rabbis that are fragmenting under the pressure of modernity. The rabbis, both of high repute, belong to different generations and display differing levels of stringency—the stricter is a grandfather; the other, his son-in-law, is more lenient but by no means lax. Both expect their own sons to become rabbis too, or at least Torah scholars, and their daughters to marry men of the same ilk. I can’t emphasize enough the intensity of the obligation felt by Jewish parents of the time to make sure that they vouchsafed a life of Torah to their children.

Predictably, the children have other ideas. One daughter, loving but stubborn, leaves for Vilna to study nursing. The youngest son, the darling of both families, upsets his father and grandfather by openly aspiring to join the halutzim, or Zionist pioneers; the pious Jews of the day abhorred Zionists because they had the audacity to try to found a state in the Holy Land without the intervention of the Messiah. Even worse, Zionists cast off religious strictures, dressing immodestly and eating treyf (nonkosher) food. The most treyf of the sons is not a Zionist, though. He goes to Switzerland for a doctorate in philosophy, marries a non-Jewish Swiss woman, and doesn’t circumcise their son. Whether his parents realize the extent of his apostasy isn’t clear. The way the family avoids talking about it, you might think that confronting it directly would kill them.

The theme of intergenerational conflict may sound familiar to anyone who is acquainted with Sholem Aleichem’s canonical “Tevye the Milkman” stories, or has seen Fiddler on the Roof, which is based on them—or, for that matter, has read Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or even D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. The battle between parents and wayward children is the archetypal plot of modernization. But Grade has his own approach to it. Sholem Aleichem, the most important figure in the late-19th-century Yiddish renaissance, tells it from the father’s—Tevye’s—point of view. As Ruth Wisse points out in her study of Sholem Aleichem in The Modern Jewish Canon, all of his contemporaries writing on the same topic, in Yiddish or Hebrew or a non-Jewish language, more or less side with the rebels.

Grade doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse the values of either generation, though he is slightly more sympathetic to the parents. That makes sense: Nothing strengthens the case for tradition more than its destruction. The parents draw us into their earnest struggle to repress their horror at their children’s deviations from religious norms. The wife of the younger couple plays deaf and lets disturbing information slide by. Her husband, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, makes a valiant effort not to recriminate; he blames himself for his children’s choices. Would that he were a simple Jew in a poor village, Sholem Shachne thinks. Then he wouldn’t have spoiled his children.

His father-in-law, the more severe Rabbi Eli-Leizer Epstein, is not in the habit of second-guessing himself, and he will be harshly punished for his dogmatism by a deranged son. The son is his father’s fiendish double, an antic, self-loathing imp who, loudly proclaiming his adoration of Eli-Leizer, makes a mockery of him. This character may be Grade’s most magnificently grotesque creation, half demon, half schlemiel. His get-rich schemes end in disgrace; his marriage to a wealthy heiress bankrupts and breaks her. They move back to his hometown, ostensibly to run a store selling fancy china bequeathed to her by her father (which no one in the poor village wants, and which will soon be smashed to pieces), but really to stalk his father and demolish his reputation. Eli-Leizer comes to understand that his son’s aim is to hold up a hideously distorting mirror before him, “bringing him untold humiliation with the mimicking of his piety and his zealotry.”

Eventually parents and children start to soften toward each other, but because Grade didn’t finish the second volume, we don’t know for sure whether or how he would have resolved the tensions. In any case, as readers know even if the characters don’t, the Germans would occupy eastern Poland in a few short years, making all other concerns irrelevant. In the background, Grade tracks the whirlwind of history as it picks up speed. Jewish socialist youth groups parade through the marketplace and put on a tumbling show that highlights their muscular and shockingly exposed limbs (they wear shorts). More menacingly, anti-Semitic Polish-nationalist hooligans have mounting success enforcing a boycott against Jewish merchants in villages across the region. All of this really happened in the ’30s.

Toward the end of the book, Grade unites life and fiction in the character of a lapsed yeshiva bocher (student) named Khlavneh who has become a Yiddish poet. He is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter, the one who went to Vilna to study nursing. Lest we fail to grasp that Khlavneh is a self-portrait, Grade drops hints. The daughter, for instance—an attractive, spirited woman, perhaps the most appealing figure in the novel—is named Bluma Rivtcha, a rhyming echo of Frumme-Liebe, the name of Grade’s murdered first wife, also a nurse and also the daughter of a rabbi.

Bluma Rivtcha brings Khlavneh home to meet the family. Over Shabbos dinner, the brother who moved to Switzerland and no longer observes Jewish laws ridicules him for writing poetry in “jargon”—that is, Yiddish, the bastard language of the uneducated Jew, “a common person, an ignoramus, a boor”—rather than in Hebrew, and for thinking that he and his fellow Yiddish writers could capture the spirit and poetry of Jewish life without following Jewish law themselves. Khlavneh refutes the brother in a brilliant show of erudition, then concludes: “You hate the jargon boys and girls because they have the courage to be different from their fathers and grandfathers, even to wage battles with their fathers and grandfathers, and yet, they don’t run away from home.” The father, who everyone thinks will be offended by a guest’s outburst at the Sabbath table, laughs in delight. Grade, having fashioned a world in which the old fights mattered, now gets to win them.

In Grade’s lifetime, he was considered one of the most important living Yiddish novelists—by those who could read Yiddish. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, some fellow Yiddish writers believed it should have gone to Grade instead. (In a 1974 review, Elie Wiesel had called him “one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists,” and “the most authentic.”) But he never received the wider recognition he deserved. In 1969, Cynthia Ozick published a short story in Commentary called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” which paints a comi-tragic picture of a literary universe that has room for only one famous Yiddish writer. An obscure Yiddish poet in New York named Edelshtein rages against an old friend and enemy—Ostrover, another Yiddish writer in New York—who is internationally acclaimed for his colorful tales of love and sexual perversion, dybbuks and other folkloric creatures. In a harassing late-night call, Edelshtein howls at Ostrover that the murder of Yiddish has turned him into a ghost who doesn’t even know he’s dead.

[From the January 1979 issue: Lance Morrow on the spirited world of I. B. Singer]

Ostrover is Singer, of course, and Edelshtein could have been Grade. Some scholars think he was; others say he was modeled on another forgotten genius, the poet Jacob Glatstein. Ozick herself once said that she’d based Edelshtein at least partially on an uncle, a Hebrew poet. Whichever writer she had in mind, it was a pitch-perfect portrayal of Grade’s situation. And he suffered an additional indignity: His name was posthumously all but erased by his widow, Inna. For whatever reasons, including possible mental instability, she foiled almost every attempt to publish his work, whether in Yiddish or in translation. After his death, she signed a contract with his English-language publisher Knopf to bring out Sons and Daughters (under a different title, The Rabbi’s House), but then she stopped responding to the book’s editor and the project stalled. His unpublished work became available to the public only after she died, in 2010.

In the four decades since Grade’s death, Yiddish has had a revival. Chairs in Yiddish have been endowed at major universities. Klezmer is cool. The number of haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, who grow up speaking Yiddish has risen and keeps rising: The haredi community has the highest rate of growth in the Jewish world. To be sure, none of this guarantees that Grade will finally get his due. As a rule, haredim don’t engage with secular texts. And many of those who learn the language in college or read it in translation are drawn to it because it’s coded as politically and sexually radical. In the old days, Yiddish—especially written Yiddish—was associated with women, who were not taught Hebrew. Yiddish literature and theater had their golden age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when a Jewish left and a Jewish avant-garde defiantly embraced the then-stigmatized dialect. Today, it appeals to some in search of an alternative Judaism: Yiddish is not Hebrew, and therefore not Israeli. In the latest twist in the singular history of Yiddish, it has become the emblematic language of Jewish diasporism, the quest to reinvent a Judaism without a Jewish homeland.

Grade’s work, however, is not radical. He dabbled in socialism in Vilna, but then he encountered Soviet Communism. He wrote sympathetically about women and created formidable female characters, but his protagonists are mostly male (as is rabbinic society), and I wouldn’t call him a feminist. Nor does Grade’s account of life in prewar Europe support the diasporist claim that Jews would be perfectly safe without a state.

In the introduction to Sons and Daughters, Adam Kirsch calls it “probably the last great Yiddish novel.” In all likelihood, he’s right, but I like to think that a vibrant Yiddish literary culture just might emerge from the ranks of the religious, as it did in 19th-century Europe. Ex-haredim such as Shalom Auslander are writing remarkable memoirs and novels. Admittedly, they’re in English. Any real renaissance of the Yiddish novel would require a critical mass of native Yiddish speakers and writers, who almost certainly would have to come from ultra-Orthodox enclaves—which is not unimaginable. Hasidim are already producing historical and adventure novels in Yiddish.

In 2022, the Forward ran an essay by Yossi Newfield, who was raised as a Hasidic Jew, about his discovery of Grade’s novel The Yeshiva: “The struggles Grade so masterfully described between faith and doubt, between Torah and the world, in his words, di kloyz un di gas, were my own.” Intentionally or not, Newfield echoed something Grade wrote in a letter in 1973: “The writer inside me is a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.” The struggle may be an affliction, but it fueled Grade’s masterpieces. Who knows? The next great Yiddish novelist may be growing up in haredi Brooklyn right now.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Last Great Yiddish Novel.”

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As a behavioral scientist with a long interest and background in the arts, I’ve always been fascinated by the 20th-century Catalan surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Many regard him as a genius, but he is at least as famed for his eccentricity as his art. He claimed, for example, to be a reincarnation of the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, in whose guise he could “remember vividly,” he said, “undergoing the dark night of the soul.”

Where disagreement over Dalí does occur, it centers on whether his madness was real or feigned. Those who believe the latter argue that he was a compulsive liar who manipulated people with his outlandish impostures to gain success. Why might Dalí practice deception in such a bizarre and audacious way? Perhaps a compulsion to deceive was not in spite of his extraordinary creative powers, but actually because of them.

“Imagination,” wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, “is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity.” To which he added, “I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men.” It sounds as if Pascal had a bone to pick with artists; in fact, he was ahead of his time in divining what, centuries later, researchers found evidence for: an organic link between creativity and corrupt behavior.

What Pascal missed was that creativity does not inherently lead to unethical conduct. Creativity is a particular form of power: the power to see new possibilities more clearly than others do. And, like any other power, creativity is commonly misused when not deployed in the service of others. Fortunately, there are ways you can use your creativity that truly enhance your life and others’.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Mindfulness hurts. That’s why it works.]

Researchers have looked carefully at whether highly creative people tend to be more or less ethical than the population average. At first glance, the evidence is mixed: Some studies show a positive relationship, while others show no association. But closer examination of that apparently conflicting finding tells a different story. Studies showing no connection between creativity and unethical conduct are based on self-reporting surveys, whereas the positive correlation comes from objective measures, such as observation of unethical behavior by other people or in experiments. In other words, creatives say they’re not unethical—surprise!—but are observed to be so by others.

One example of this pattern is a 2013 psychological experiment in which college students were offered class credit for participation. They were given a test of their creativity in which they had to come up with one word that would associatively link three random other ones. (For instance, if the prompt words were falling, actor, and dust, a person might connect them with the word star.) They were then asked to rate their own integrity. These exercises were followed by a tedious survey that they had to complete to get the credit. But the survey was designed in such a way that participants could see how to skip part of it undetected (so they assumed), but claim they had fully done it. The cheaters on the survey registered as much more creative in the word test than the non-cheaters, yet the cheaters scored their own integrity at roughly the same level as the non-cheaters rated theirs.

Creativity and unethical behavior tend to be most strongly correlated when, as one 2017 study showed, rules are vague and hard to enforce, rather than clear and unambiguous. This can occur in romantic relationships where expectations about exclusivity and fidelity are assumed but not spelled out; differing assumptions can lead to, well, creative ambiguity. If an artist or a musician has been unfaithful to you, this might explain why. (Indeed, poets and artists tend to have more sexual partners than the population average.) Lack of clarity in the mind-numbing million words of the Internal Revenue Code may also explain the problem of “creative accounting” in some businesses’ tax declarations.

[Read: Mapping creativity in the brain]

If, as I argued above, creativity is not just a gift but also a form of power, then—just as “power tends to corrupt,” as Lord Acton said—humans can be tempted to misuse their creativity. I could argue with Lord Acton, in fact, over whether power is inherently corrupting, but I know, from the extensive research on the topic, that holding power over others can certainly be correlated with unethical behavior such as cheating.

One personality trait that links creative power and dishonesty is narcissism. In Dalí’s 1942 autobiography—which a disgusted George Orwell later called “a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight”—the surrealist showman proudly diagnosed himself a narcissist, a judgment that anyone with even a passing familiarity with his life will find hard to refute. Indeed, narcissism is strongly correlated with many measures of creativity, as well as with unethical behavior.

People who are self-absorbed find that this quality helps them tap into their creative potential. But this very self-absorption also tends to make them selfish and willing to cut ethical corners to benefit themselves. That is certainly a risk for people with creative power. But for those who can resist their narcissistic impulses and use their creativity for the good of others, the result is almost bound to be ethical.

One way to ensure that you’re using your creative power ethically borrows an entrepreneur’s standard technique by subjecting every decision to a checklist of conditions. For example, a small start-up might stay focused on its mission by making sure that any new opportunity is: 1) sustainable; 2) scalable; and 3) potentially profitable. In an analogous way, I use an ordered algorithm for my own creative work (including this column) to ensure that it meets my ethical standards. It must: 1) glorify the divine; 2) uplift others; and 3) be interesting to me. If a given piece of work meets only criterion 1, or 1 and 2, I might still go ahead with it; but if it does not achieve 1 and 2, I won’t proceed under any circumstances.

The idea of setting those ordered criteria is to prevent me from ever engaging in creative work that is snarky, hurtful, or indecent. I recommend it: Even if you don’t see yourself as “a creative,” you can use the approach to apply your own algorithm of ethical service and love for others.

[Read: Gaudí’s Basilica: Almost finished after 132 years]

Dalí used his prodigious creativity to amplify his own prestige, fame, and wealth. His life and work were marked by egotism, manipulative behavior, and ruined relationships. By all accounts, that did not end well: By the time of his death, he was mired in depression and alienated from others. Despite his evident genius, Dalí is not someone to emulate in your own creative endeavors, artistic or otherwise.

A model I prefer is Dalí’s Catalan forebear, the modernist architect Antoni Gaudí, who designed Barcelona’s stunningly beautiful Sagrada Familia basilica. A deeply religious Catholic, he dedicated this and his other works to glorifying God and lifting up the people who saw and used them; the Vatican is considering the case for Gaudí’s canonization.

Even Dalí admired and praised Gaudí’s extraordinary creations—but, being Dalí, he couldn’t resist injecting a nasty little jab inside his praise: “Those who have not tasted his superbly creative bad taste are traitors.”

In your creative endeavors, be a Gaudí, not a Dalí.

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.

Dear James,

I love my kids more than life itself. My 6-year-old boy is funny, sensitive, smart, and beautiful. My 3-year-old daughter is a riot; she makes everyone around her scream with laughter. She’s also freakin’ cute. But lord help me if either of them asks me to play dress-up, a board game, or Legos.

I’ll give myself some credit. My husband and I both work full time as schoolteachers. During the winter, my husband coaches sports on the weekends, so I’m cooped up alone with the kids, which feels like a cruel human experiment. Yet even when the weather gets nicer, I’d rather sit on a deck chair with my laptop than play soccer or tag with my darling cherubs. Sure, it gets easier as it gets warmer and brighter in the evenings, but I’m still bogged down by endless laundry and dishes, and I rarely get a break, because my kids are too little to venture out in the yard on their own.

Every afternoon, I’m riddled with mom guilt, knowing I’m supposed to be savoring these moments. My husband regularly sings Trace Adkins’s “You’re Gonna Miss This” to me, mockingly. I’m not looking to get rid of the guilt; I’ve read enough parenting blogs to know that eventually, I’ll probably be managing the crippling feeling that the kids are growing up too fast. What I want is to want to play with my kids. I want to pick them up from school and be excited to play Zingo, hide-and-seek, and fairy princess. I want to want to play a family game of Monopoly instead of watching Frozen for the 1,896th time on a Friday night. How do I get there?

Dear Reader,

You’re absolutely right: This is a cruel human experiment. The psychedelic locusts who run the universe, nine feet tall and grinding their forelegs together like violin bows, surpassed themselves in horrid ingenuity when they designed the nuclear family. They get high on the clouds of shame it produces; the drone of its neurosis delights them. Three or four or five humans of different sizes in a closed space, fatally attached and working up new varieties of stifled misery, for years … Perfect.

But there are ways to beat the locusts—ways to short-circuit or break out of the experiment.

I’m not going to presume to give you tips on how to enjoy your children (for example, make them play with you, according to an entertainment syllabus designed around your interests). You’re a schoolteacher; you know all of this already. I’m not going to tell you about my friend Tom, who once said to me that most of his life as a parent seemed to be spent “fobbing off” his children in one way or another. I’m not even going to preach about the concept of fertile neglect and the ecology of the imagination—which must be allowed to renew itself, without interference, without parents. (In other words: Get your kids settled somewhere sort of safe, and then guiltlessly clear out. Leave them be.)

No, the core advice is this: Let yourself off the hook. Completely. Confound our insect overlords by simply refusing to emit the fumes of parental angst that they enjoy so much. Shut yourself down as a shame-producer! Extend to your trying-very-hard self the same compassion you would offer to anyone else in the same situation. Why should you have the faintest interest in board games or Legos, for God’s sake? You’re an adult. Not only that; you spend much of your working life attempting to engage and instruct children. When you get home, and when you get a minute to yourself, it’s time to luxuriate in some minor grown-up vices. It’s time to smoke rank cigarettes and watch films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the dark.

Wishing you hours of private naughtiness,

James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Photographs by Jake Dockins

Peter greeted me in the mostly empty gravel parking lot of a Mennonite church on the outskirts of Seminole, a small city in West Texas surrounded by cotton and peanut fields. The brick building was tucked in a cobbled-together neighborhood of scrapyards, metal barns, and modest homes with long dirt driveways. No sign out front advertised its name; no message board displayed a Bible verse. No cross, no steeple—nothing, in fact, that would let a passerby know they had stumbled on a place of worship. When my car pulled up, Peter emerged to find out who I was.

He hadn’t been expecting a stranger with a notepad, but he listened as I explained that I had come to town to write about the measles outbreak, which had by that point sent 20 people from the area to the hospital and caused the death of an unnamed child, the disease’s first victim in the United States in a decade.

Of course Peter knew why Seminole was in the news. He had heard that President Trump was asked about the outbreak here during a Cabinet meeting, and he told me that he didn’t like the attention. The Mennonites were being unjustly singled out. It wasn’t like they were the only ones who came down with measles. The coverage, he insisted, was “100 percent unfair.” He didn’t think it was just the Seminole area that had problems; he said that he had family in Canada and Mexico who had also gotten measles recently. I told him I’d heard that the child who’d passed away might have come from his congregation. He said that was true.

Peter dug the toe of his boot into the gravel. I asked him if he knew the family. His voice broke slightly as he answered. “That’s our kid,” he said.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

The first case in the West Texas outbreak was announced on January 29. The official tally in the region grew to six over the next week. By Valentine’s Day, it was up to 48. On February 26, news went out that a child had died; by that point, 124 cases had been confirmed across nine counties, making the outbreak the largest that the state had seen in 30 years. The official count now stands at just about 200, and another person who was diagnosed with measles just died across the border in New Mexico.

An outbreak—even one this big—should not have come as a surprise. Vaccination rates have dipped in many states, including Texas, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In Gaines County, where Seminole is located, the measles-vaccination rate among kindergartners is just 82 percent, well short of the estimated 95 percent threshold for maintaining herd immunity. Even that alarming figure would appear to undersell the local problem. Many children from the county’s Mennonite community, which numbers in the thousands, are unvaccinated, but they won’t get picked up in state tallies, because they are either homeschooled or enrolled in nonaccredited private schools, which are not required to collect such data.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

Even in the midst of a measles crisis, persuading parents in rural West Texas to vaccinate their children, or just to get tested for the virus, is an uphill battle. Zach Holbrooks, the executive director of the South Plains Public Health District, told me that he’s spent the past month trying to get the word out, particularly to the Low German–speaking Mennonite community. He asked three local churches if he could set up a mobile testing site on their property. They all refused. “I think there’s some sentiment that they’re being targeted,” he said, “and I don’t like the fact that they feel that way.” His team did create a drive-up testing site at a county events building next to the city park, and not far from the Masonic lodge. But he said that it gets very few visitors—about two or three a day. As a result, no one really knows the outbreak’s total size.

[Read: America is botching measles]

Help from the federal government has been slow to arrive. Weeks into the outbreak, the Department of Health and Human Services directed 2,000 doses of vaccine to be sent to Texas. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed HHS secretary, initially reacted to the outbreak by claiming that it was “not unusual.” Since then, he has repeatedly reminded the public that the decision to be immunized is a personal one, even while acknowledging that vaccines “not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity.” He has also claimed that good nutrition might be sufficient to protect people from the worst effects of measles. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times,” Kennedy falsely told Fox News’s Marc Siegel in an interview last week. He’d had “a very, very emotional and long conversation” with the family of the child who had died, he said; and later added that “malnutrition may have been an issue in her death.” Local health officials told The New York Times that the child who died had “no known underlying conditions.” A spokesman for HHS declined to comment.

There are a half dozen Mennonite congregations in Seminole, according to Google Maps. Peter’s church isn’t listed among them. Aside from a nonprofit filing, it does not appear to have any online presence. I knew of its existence only because I’d met a Mennonite man from another congregation at a coffee shop that morning and asked whether he knew the family of the child that had died. He said he’d heard they were from this church. When I asked him where it was, he responded with a word in Low German. That turned out to be a nickname for a neighborhood a little ways outside of town. After circling county roads for a while, passing a mix of homes, horses, and farm equipment, I stopped and asked for help from a group of boys playing in a field with rocks and sticks. They pointed in unison. The church was just half a mile up the road.

That’s where I encountered Peter, a wiry 28-year-old man with an angular face who wore a dark-colored, Western-style shirt and jeans. His English was uncertain, and he spoke with a light German accent. Sometimes he responded to my questions with silence.

He declined to reveal his daughter’s name or the family’s last name. Peter was perplexed by the national news coverage, and he did not seem eager to draw more attention to his family and community. He gave only his daughter’s age: She was 6 years old. When I asked him to describe her in more detail, he waved his hand, said she liked what other kids liked. But as we stood in the parking lot, he told me the story of what happened.

Peter’s daughter had been sick for three weeks. The family knew it was measles. He said they took her to the hospital at one point, and she was given cough medicine. “That’s it,” he recalled. “They just say, ‘Go home.’ They don’t want to help us. They say, ‘It’s just normal; go home.’” (A spokeswoman for the Seminole Hospital District declined to comment, citing privacy laws.)

Photograph by Jake Dockins

It wasn’t normal, though. Her condition continued to deteriorate, so they brought her back to the doctors. “She just kept getting sicker and sicker,” he told me. “Her lungs plugged up.” Her heart rate and blood pressure dropped, and the doctors put her on a ventilator. “We were there Saturday ’til Monday, three days … and then it was worse, very bad.” Peter shook his head and stared at the ground. He said his daughter died on Tuesday night from pneumonia, which is a common infection in severe measles cases.

Peter’s daughter was not vaccinated. Mennonite doctrine does not prohibit inoculations or modern medicine in general, though I encountered plenty of suspicion among Mennonites I spoke with in Seminole. I met a father who said that he wanted to vaccinate his two daughters but that their mother didn’t think it was a good idea. A grandmother told me she knew of several children who had been given the measles vaccine and were “never the same after that.” A man who'd spent his career installing irrigation equipment said he was suspicious of vaccines in part because he believed that the government had lied about the origins of COVID.

Peter said that he has doubts about vaccines too. He told me that he considers getting measles a normal part of life, noting that his parents and grandparents had it. “Everybody has it,” he told me. “It’s not so new for us.” He’d also heard that getting measles might strengthen your immune system against other diseases, a view Kennedy has promoted in the past. But perhaps most of all, Peter worried about what the vaccine might do to his children. “The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” he said. “We don’t like the vaccinations, what they have these days. We heard too much, and we saw too much.”

During our conversation, several families arrived and went inside the building behind him. Mennonites are known for coming to the aid of fellow community members. Earlier in my visit, I’d heard a story about how Mennonites had paid off the mortgage of a young mother in the area whose husband had died in an accident. I asked Peter if he was getting enough support. He nodded: “Food, money—whatever we need.” Peter does construction for a living. He and his wife have four other small children. A couple of them appeared as we talked, grabbing at his sleeve, trying to get his attention. He leaned down to reassure them.

The death of his daughter, Peter told me, was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. “Everybody has to die,” he said. Peter’s eyes closed, and he struggled to continue talking. “It’s very hard, very hard,” he said at last. “It’s a big hole.” His voice quavered and trailed off. “Our child is here,” he said, gesturing toward the building behind him. “That’s why we’re here.”

Peter invited me to come inside the church building. He walked over to the door and held it open. I entered a small, dark, airless room with about a dozen chairs. Peter’s daughter was lying in the middle in a handmade coffin covered with fabric. Her face, framed by blond, braided pigtails, showed no sign of illness. Everything was white: her skin, her dress, the lining of her coffin, the thin ribbons that formed little bows on the cuffs of her sleeves. Her hands were clasped just below her chest. Members of her family were seated all around. No one looked up when I walked into the room. The only sounds were the trill of someone’s cellphone alert and the dry, hacking cough coming from one of her sisters in the corner.

It’s easy to dismiss statistics, to forget what they represent. Before the measles shot was introduced in 1963, the number of deaths caused by the disease in the United States each year was somewhere from 400 to 500. The CDC puts the mortality rate for childhood measles at one to three in 1,000, with one in five cases requiring hospitalization. Thanks to vaccines, the memory of that suffering has largely faded from public consciousness, at least in the developed world.

What happened in Seminole, though, was a grim reminder. The day after meeting Peter, I visited the vaccination clinic across the street from the hospital where he had first taken his daughter. I had planned to interview people who were there to get their shots, but no one showed. It occurred to me that I was now at some modest risk myself. Families from Peter’s church had cycled through the visitation service the day before, sharing air inside that stuffy room amid their grief. Like a lot of people born before 1989, I’d gotten only one measles shot as a kid, so out of an abundance of caution, I rolled up my sleeve and got a booster. Later that day, I met up with Zach Holbrooks for lunch and asked him how many other people had gotten shots that morning. It turned out to be just one, and that one was him. He, too, had received just a single dose of the vaccine in childhood, so it seemed wise to get another.

Photograph by Jake Dockins

After lunch, I made the six-hour drive back to Austin, where I live, past the pumpjacks slowly bobbing for oil and the towering wind farms. There’s nothing I heard in Seminole that I haven’t also heard from crunchy liberal friends at home who choose not to vaccinate their kids because they believe that vaccines contain toxins that cause autism or that childhood diseases bolster the immune system. (For the record, the 1998 paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism has been retracted, and research indicates that contracting measles can degrade your body’s ability to fight other infections.) Nor are Peter’s views that unusual in conservative corners of the country. A recent poll found that nearly one-third of all Republican and Republican-leaning voters, for instance, think that routine inoculations are “more dangerous than the diseases they are designed to prevent.” That’s the gist of what I heard from multiple Mennonites I interviewed. They are far from alone.

At one point in the parking lot, Peter had asked me why his daughter matters to the rest of the country. I’d struggled in the moment to come up with an answer. For Peter and his family, the loss of their daughter is a private tragedy, one that would be excruciating no matter how she died. The fact that she died of measles, though, is a sign that something has gone wrong with the country’s approach to public health. Twenty-five years ago, measles was declared “eliminated” in the United States. Now a deadly crisis is unfolding in West Texas.

Before I left the church that day, Peter and I talked for a few more minutes. “You probably know how it goes when somebody passes away,” he said. “It’s hard to believe.” Peter told me he didn’t have anything more to say. Really, what more could be said? Something unbelievable had happened: A young father was grieving the death of his 6-year-old from measles.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shane Harris, a staff writer who covers intelligence and national-security issues. He has written about the Trump administration’s military purge, what happens to federal agencies when DOGE takes over, and how Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system.

Shane recommends reading Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, a novel that is “freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three.” He also enjoys daily online etymology lessons, studying Old Masters paintings, and listening to the film scores of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The telepathy trap

America’s cultural revolution

Trump is breaking the fourth wall.

The Culture Survey: Shane Harris

The best novel I’ve recently read: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. Like its predecessor—the towering, sylvan epic The Overstory—this novel worries about the possibly untenable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The books are thematically and stylistically similar; nearly every paragraph is freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three. But Bewilderment is a quieter and more tangible story that sometimes felt like it could be The Overstory’s prequel. They are perfect companions, so if you’ve read one, read the other. [Related: The novel that asks, “What went wrong with mankind?”]

If you’ve read neither, give yourself the gift! Bewilderment follows a widowed astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, who is desperate to contain the volatile, emotional outbursts of his 9-year-old son. Robin is a prime target for bullies at school because of his affliction, which presents as a neurodivergent constellation and makes him acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of the physical degradation of the Earth and all the nonhumans that inhabit it.

Desperate for some treatment that doesn’t use medication, Theo has Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy that allows him to spend time with a version of his dead mother’s consciousness. The ramifications are … not “bewildering,” per se, but profoundly altering. When you finish the book, ask yourself, as I did, whether you would have made the same choice to bring even a modicum of relief for your child.

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I don’t love the term revisionist history, but Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey, is a highly readable book that revised my understanding of early Christianity and my thoughts about the Catholic Church. I’ll leave it to historians to debate the quality of Nixey’s scholarship—I’m way out of my depth there, but the book seems impeccably sourced and added to my evolving view on the nature of religion.

Nixey proposes that, contrary to the Catholic Church’s teachings, there was no clear agreement in Christianity’s early centuries about who Jesus was and why he mattered. Her argument is persuasive, and it excites me the way great investigative journalism does. Her book is as much a hunt to unearth old stories as it is an indictment of the Church fathers who buried them.

The last museum show that I loved: I had only a few free hours when I was in Munich last month for the annual Security Conference, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek, which houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Old Masters paintings. I wasn’t prepared for the physical scale and the beauty of this collection—and I saw only a fraction of it. I have never spent much time on this period of art because I’ve never been a huge fan of Christian imagery, which always struck me as redundant. The Alte Pinakothek converted me. There is just so much more to know about that epoch than I understood, and much of the knowledge is in that museum. I could have spent days there.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “If Christopher Calls,” by Foy Vance, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” by R.E.M.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Tom Read Wilson. I start most mornings with his word or phrase of the day on Instagram. Tom is a devoted lover of spoken language and a keen etymologist. He recently explained the Latin origins of the word risible, and demonstrated how it could be used positively and negatively. He shares colorful figures of speech from Australia, South Africa, and the American South, always in a regionally appropriate accent. (His Texas twang is really good.) On weekends, he will recite a Shakespearean sonnet—he is learning and performing all of them in order.

That’s all great. But I think Tom is at his best when he eschews the high-minded stuff. I first encountered him when the Instagram algorithm served up his straight-faced explanation of a “shit sandwich.” “Now, I don’t mean a sandwich containing fecal matter, nor do I mean a really rubbish panini,” Tom explained. He asked us to imagine a three-paragraph email in which bad news or criticism is sandwiched between more pleasant and easier-to-swallow sentences. Well, we’ve all received one of those! [Related: The two most dismissive words on the internet]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who is probably best known for his collaboration with the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson scored Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, which is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. (Sicario, by the way, is a movie that bears rewatching in light of the actions that the U.S. government is poised to take against Mexican drug cartels.) I am also captivated by Jóhannsson’s score for his own film, Last and First Men. He died from a drug overdose two years before the release; the composer Yair Elazar Glotman finished the music and collaborated with other superb musicians, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar in 2020 for scoring Joker. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]

I love Jóhannsson’s film scores and often listen to them while I write. But don’t overlook his studio albums. Fordlandia, inspired by a failed utopia that Henry Ford wanted to build in the jungles of Brazil, is so thematically coherent that you could imagine it was written for a movie. Jóhannsson’s work is often dark, brooding, and eerie, but it can be surprisingly melodic, and I love that he treats any object that can make a sound as a musical instrument. He occupies the same place in my imagination as Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who also died far too young from an overdose. They would surely have given us more masterpieces, but any artist would envy the body of work they left behind.

The Week Ahead

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new spy-thriller film about an intelligence agent whose wife is accused of betraying her country (in theaters Friday)

Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series about five young villagers who are part of an ancient prophecy (out Thursday)

Liquid: A Love Story, a novel by Mariam Rahmani about a Muslim scholar who leaves her career in academia to marry rich instead (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty.

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

By Shayla Love

What Ketamine Does to the Human BrainBy Shayla LoveLast month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Read the full article.

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Photo Album

Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters

Revelers watch a giant wooden installation depicting a mill tower burn during the annual celebration of Maslenitsa at the Nikola-Lenivets art park southwest of Moscow, on March 1, 2025. The cherished Russian folk festival has its origins in an ancient Slavic holiday marking the end of winter and spring’s arrival.

Spend time with photos of the week, including a caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, and more.

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