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The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the color of my blouse. Never again would I twist underneath a hand dryer to dry my damp underarms. It was time to try clinical-strength antiperspirant.

The one I bought looked like any old antiperspirant, a solid white cream encased in a plastic applicator. But its instructions seemed unusual: “For best results, apply every night before bed and again in the morning.”

Every night?

I swiped it across my armpits before bed, and to my surprise, they were dry all the next day. I kept poking them in disbelief—deserts. But I would later discover that there isn’t anything particularly special about this product. Nighttime application improves the effects of any traditional antiperspirant, including those combined with deodorant (the former blocks sweat while the latter masks smell). Research has shown this for at least 20 years; none of the experts I spoke with disagreed. Yet many of us swipe our armpits in the morning before we head out for the day. Somehow, Americans are trapped in a perspiration delusion.

Putting on antiperspirant in the evening feels roughly akin to styling your hair right before bed. Both are acts of personal maintenance that people take not only for their own well-being but also in anticipation of interactions with others. This idea is reinforced by ads for antiperspirants, which tend to feature half-dressed actors getting ready in bathrooms or changing rooms; see, for example, the Old Spice guy. These ads also tend to mention how long their products work—24 hours, 36 hours—implying that their effectiveness starts to fade once they are applied. In a recent Secret commercial, a woman rolls on antiperspirant in a daylit bathroom, then scrambles to make her bus, relieved that she is prepared for such sweaty moments for the next 72 hours.

What these ads don’t say is that these products need the right conditions to work effectively. Antiperspirant isn’t a film on the surface of the armpit that stops moisture from leaking through, like a tarp over wet grass. Instead, it functions like a bunch of microscopic champagne corks, temporarily sealing sweat glands from spraying their contents. The active ingredient in most antiperspirants is some form of aluminum salt, compounds that combine with moisture on the skin to form “gel plugs” that dam up the sweat glands. These gel plugs prevent not only wetness but also odors, because bacteria responsible for foul smells thrive best in moist (and hairy) conditions, according to Dee Anna Glaser, a dermatologist and board member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society, a group that advocates for patients with excessive sweatiness.

Gel plugs are finicky. They need a little bit of sweat in order to form—but not too much. Antiperspirant applied in the morning isn’t ideal, because people sweat more during waking hours, when they’re active. If the armpits are too sweaty in the hours after application, the product gets washed away before it can form the plugs. The body is cooler and calmer during sleep. For gel plugs to form, “baseline sweating is optimal at nighttime before bed,” Glaser told me. Nighttime application has been shown to increase the sweat-reduction ability of normal antiperspirant from 56 percent to 73 percent.

But wait, I can already hear you thinking, what happens if I shower in the morning? Here’s the thing: Antiperspirant lasts through a shower. “The plugs won’t wash away much,” even though the residue and scent probably will, Mike Thomas, a former scientist with Procter & Gamble and an advocate for the International Hyperhidrosis Society, told me. After 24 hours or more, the plug naturally dissolves. Reapplying antiperspirant during the day can be beneficial, Shoshana Marmon, a dermatology professor at New York Medical College, told me. Still, it works best if applied to dry armpits that, ideally, stay dry enough for the plugs to form. For most people, Marmon added, putting it on “clean, dry skin at night” provides enough protection to last through the next day.

Again, none of this information is new or hard to find. One of the earliest studies demonstrating the value of nighttime application was published in 2004; it showed that applying antiperspirant in the evening, or twice daily, was significantly more effective than morning-only use. Indeed, the stance of the American Academy of Dermatology is that it’s best to put antiperspirant on at night. Media outlets have covered this guidance since at least 2009.

For the perpetually sweaty, discovering this guidance only now, after decades of embarrassing photos and ruined shirts, might spark belief in a grand conspiracy: They don’t want you to know the truth about armpit sweat. Indeed, it isn’t mentioned on the labels of most regular-strength antiperspirants. The reasons for this are more banal than nefarious. Most people don’t sweat excessively, so applying antiperspirant the usual way is sufficient. “Manufacturers may keep instructions simple to fit general habits, so the idea of using antiperspirant at night doesn’t always make it into mainstream awareness,” Danilo C. Del Campo, a dermatologist at Chicago Skin Clinic, told me. The difference between antiperspirant and deodorant still eludes many people and, in fact, may bolster the insistence on morning application. Deodorant is essentially perfume and has no impact on sweat production. It’s “best applied when odor control is most needed, typically in the mornings,” Marmon said.

When I asked brand representatives why so many antiperspirants don’t mention nighttime use in the directions, they pointed to the potential for confusion. “It’s a bit counterintuitive for people to use antiperspirant at night, because most people think of applying it as part of their morning routine,” Maiysha Jones, a principal scientist at P&G North America Personal Care, which owns brands such as Secret and Old Spice, told me. But, she added, it is indeed best to use it at night. “Antiperspirants are commonly assumed to be a morning-only product and applied during the morning routine,” Megan Smith, a principal scientist at Degree Deodorant, told me.

In other words, people are used to applying antiperspirant in the morning because companies don’t tell them about the nighttime hack … but companies don’t tell them because people are used to putting it on in the morning. Omitting helpful instructions just because they might be confusing isn’t doing America’s perspirers any favors. Anyone who’s ever experienced an overly moist underarm can surely be coaxed into shifting armpit maintenance back a measly eight hours. People go to far greater lengths to self-optimize, whether it’s teens adopting multistep skin-care routines, or wellness bros taking dozens of supplements.

The science is well established, and the guidance is clear. But the ranks of nighttime swipers may not increase immediately. Routines have to be reset, assumptions picked apart. Some evenings, I find it exhilarating to buck the orthodoxy of personal hygiene. Other nights, it gives me pause. Applicator hovers over armpit, brain stumbles on belief. Will this really last past the sunrise, through a shower, beyond the hustle of the day? Even after learning about the science, “some people just don’t believe,” Thomas said. All there is to do is try. In go the corks, out go the lights.

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When Mary-Claire King discovered the first gene linked to hereditary breast cancer in 1990, she also got to decide its name. She settled on the four letters BRCA, which had three distinct meanings. The name paid homage to UC Berkeley, where King worked at the time; more to the point, it was a nod to Paul Broca, the 19th-century French physician whose work established a link between family history and breast cancer. It was also an abbreviation for breast cancer.

A few years after King discovered BRCA1, a second BRCA gene, BRCA2, was identified. Together, they now have more name recognition than probably any other gene, their profile boosted by research that has shown staggering effects on cancer risk. Awareness campaigns followed. A 2013 New York Times op-ed in which Angelina Jolie revealed she’d had a preventive double mastectomy because of her own BRCA mutation drove many women to seek DNA tests themselves. The BRCA genes became inextricably linked with breasts, as much as the pink ribbons that have become an international symbol of breast cancer. And in driving more women to find out if they have BRCA mutations, it’s helped to greatly reduce the risk of hereditary breast cancer.

But in the three decades since the genes were discovered, scientists have learned that BRCA mutations can also lead to cancer in the ovaries, the pancreas, and the prostate. More recently, they have been linked with cancers in other parts of the body, such as the esophagus, stomach, and skin. As many as 60 percent of men with changes in BRCA2 develop prostate cancer, yet men are generally far less aware than women that BRCA mutations can affect them at all.

“It’s a branding problem,” Colin Pritchard, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington, told me. Men with family histories of breast cancer may not realize that they should get screened. Physicians, too, lack awareness of which men should get tested, and what steps to take when a mutation is found. Now Pritchard and other researchers are working to rebrand BRCA and the syndrome associated with it so that more men and their doctors consider testing.

Normally, the BRCA genes produce proteins that help repair damaged DNA throughout the body. Most people who carry mutations that impair the gene’s function are diagnosed with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome. (Having HBOC means a person is at increased risk for cancer, not that they already have an illness.) Most breast-cancer cases have no known hereditary link, but more than 60 percent of women with a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer, compared with about 13 percent of the wider female population. Men, of course, can get breast cancer too, but it's rare, even among BRCA-mutation carriers.

[Read: Cancer supertests are here]

The full significance of the link between BRCA mutations and pancreatic and prostate cancer has become clear only recently—perhaps in the past decade, said Pritchard. The exact risk these mutations impart to men varies widely in studies. But it’s clearly significant: Not only are men with BRCA mutations more likely to develop prostate cancer, they are also more likely to develop the more aggressive forms of the disease.

Roughly one in 400 people carry a harmful mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2, and half of them are men. But women are far more likely to have been tested for the mutations—up to 10 times as likely, according to one study. “Beyoncé’s dad was the only man that I had ever heard of who had it,” Christian Anderson, a 46-year-old social-sciences professor in Washington State who carries a BRCA2 mutation, told me. Anderson got tested after his sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, but countless men like him go undetected. Only about half of Americans get an annual physical, and doctors aren’t always aware of BRCA-screening recommendations for men. Many men who do test for a BRCA mutation report doing it for their daughters, and studies have shown that they tend to be confused about their risks of developing cancer themselves.

BRCA-awareness campaigns have led many women to get tested; in the two weeks after Angelina Jolie’s viral op-ed, researchers found that BRCA-testing rates went up by 65 percent. In that case, more people may gotten tested than needed to, but in general, the rise in cancer screenings and elective surgical interventions have helped reduce the rates of deaths from breast and ovarian cancers. Education about the genes’ links to other cancers could do the same for men. To that end, Pritchard argued in a 2019 Nature commentary that Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer syndrome should be renamed King Syndrome after Mary-Claire King. “We need to really rethink this if we're going to educate the public about the importance of these genes for cancer risk for everyone, not just women,” he told me.

[Read: I’ll tell you the secret of cancer]

As understanding of BRCA’s risks for men has grown, Pritchard’s idea has started to catch on. King, who is now a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, demurred when I asked her whether the syndrome associated with the BRCA genes should be renamed after her, but agreed that awareness campaigns have focused too narrowly on breasts and ovaries. “We need to bring this awareness to men in the same way that we have for 30 years now to women,” she told me.

How exactly Pritchard’s plan might be put into action is unclear. Gene names are overseen by an international committee and rarely changed. That’s part of why Pritchard is suggesting that the name of the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations become King Syndrome—no single governing body oversees that. Recently, ClinGen, an international group of researchers that works to parse the medical significance of genes, recommended that HBOC be rechristened BRCA-related cancer predisposition. (Pritchard told me he thinks that name isn’t quite as “catchy” as King Syndrome.)

Uncoupling the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations from breasts would likely be only the first step in getting more at-risk men screened for cancer. It would also be an important step in understanding the full impact of BRCA mutations on men. Because fewer men than women have been tested for BRCA mutations, scientists still don’t have a complete picture of their risk. For example, Pritchard told me, it’s only as more attention has been drawn to male BRCA risk that researchers have discovered mutations are linked to especially aggressive forms of prostate cancer. Penn Medicine recently launched a program dedicated to men and BRCA in part to continue this sort of research.

[Read: Scientists have been studying cancers in a very strange way for decades]

BRCA’s name is a legacy of a time when scientists thought genetics would offer a simple way to diagnose and treat disease—that one specific mutation would point definitively to one specific cancer. But today, “the idea that a gene would only affect one type of cancer risk is probably outmoded,” Pritchard said. The more scientists explore the human genome, the more complex its connections to health appear. It turns out that when genes don’t work like they should, the possible consequences may very well be infinite.

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When I was teaching indoor cycling every week, an unexpected benefit of the gig was free ice cream. One of the class regulars had an ice-cream machine at home and sometimes brought samples for me to try, in flavors such as pumpkin and pistachio. I think he did this not only because he was a nice person but also because in class, I was the nicest version of myself: warm, welcoming, and encouraging to the point of profound corniness, despite my usual caustic tendencies.

I noticed this friendliness in others too. Two people who met in my class started dating. Strangers who became friends there went out for post-workout coffees. Two of the other class regulars invited me to go skiing with them. Many of the good friends I have at age 35 are people I met in exercise classes I attended regularly. These experiences have convinced me that group fitness classes are the best place to make friends as an adult—an idea supported by research that suggests that the glow of exercise’s feel-good chemicals has interpersonal benefits.

Once, countless friendships were born in what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places”: physical spaces that aren’t a home or a workplace, don’t charge (much) for entry, and exist in large part to foster conversation. Over the past several decades, though—and especially as a result of the pandemic—third places such as bars and cafés have begun playing a much smaller role in social life, depriving American adults of opportunities for chance encounters that can lead to friendships. Perhaps that’s partly why Americans rank improving their relationships among their top New Year’s resolutions.

Group fitness classes don’t exactly fit the definition of a third place: They cost money, and the primary activities within them are sweating, grunting, and skipping a few reps when the instructor isn’t looking. But they fulfill many conditions that social-psychology research has repeatedly shown to help forge meaningful connections between strangers: proximity (being in the same place), ritual (at the same time, over and over), accumulation (for many hours), and shared experiences or interests (because you do and like the same things).

[From the December 2019 issue: I joined a stationary-biker gang]

Sussing out shared interests can be horribly awkward when you meet someone new at work or even at a party. Group fitness classes make it a little easier, Stephanie Roth Goldberg, an athlete psychotherapist in New York, told me. “Automatically, when you walk into a fitness class, you likely are sharing the idea that ‘We like to exercise,’ or ‘We like to do this particular kind of exercise,’” she said. “It breaks the ice differently than standing in a bar or at someone’s house.” Of course, breaking the ice still requires someone to say something, which, if you’re sweaty and huffing, is frankly terrifying. Whether I’m an instructor or a classmate, one simple tactic has never failed me: I simply walk up to someone after class and say, “Hey, good job!”

Proximity, ritual, and accumulation all require a certain amount of time, which can be hard to come by in a country that requires and rewards long hours at work. But you’re already making time for exercise class, and it provides those conditions; benefitting from them mostly requires acknowledging that you’ve already set yourself up for friendship. Danielle Friedman, a journalist and the author of Let’s Get Physical, told me that breaking through what she calls the “social code of anonymity” is key to making friends. “If you’ve been going to the same class for a while and start seeing the same people, don’t pretend like you’ve never interacted before,” she said.

That kind of friendliness requires adopting the clichéd feel-goodery inherent in many group fitness classes. In my spin classes, I’d cringe whenever I caught myself doling out motivational platitudes—mostly “We’re all in this together!” because I needed the reminder too, as I tried to talk and spin at the same time. Inevitably, though, someone would “Woo!” in response and reenergize the whole room. I’d load up my playlists with high-tempo remixes of early-aughts Top 40 hits and catch people singing along. One of my favorite instructors in a class I attended regularly instituted “Fun Friday,” when we’d warm up by doing silly little relay races or grade-school-style games; my blood ran cold the first time she told us to partner up for this cheesefest, but I had a blast. Everyone did.

In a world that prizes ironic detachment, embracing such earnest silliness can feel deeply uncomfortable. But—and you might as well get used to hearing this kind of phrase now, if you’re going to start attending classes—you just have to push through. “When you’re sweating, feeling a little out of control of your physical self, whooping and yelling, there’s a vulnerability,” Friedman said. “If you buy in, then you’ve shared something. There aren’t that many contexts as adults where you have that opportunity to be vulnerable together.”

[Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard]

A room full of grown adults flailing, shouting, and running miles without ever going anywhere is a fundamentally ridiculous prospect. Ridiculous things, however, play a crucial role in connecting with others: They make us laugh. Studies show that laughing with others facilitates social connection by helping us feel that we have more in common. The “happy hormones” released during exercise—endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin—are also associated with bonding. In particular, exercising in sync with others promotes close relationships.

Even if you don’t find your next best friend at Zumba, getting into a fitness habit of some kind might help you meet people and make friends in other spaces. “The more that people can step out of their comfort zone in one setting, the less intimidating it is to do in other settings,” Goldberg said. Perhaps you’ll even become the version of yourself who inspires people to bring you homemade ice cream. Win-win.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. An advocacy organization that he founded and chaired has called the nation’s declining child-immunization rates “good news,” and referred to parents’ lingering doubts about routine shots as COVID-19’s “silver lining.” Now Kennedy may soon be overseeing the cluster of federal agencies that license and recommend vaccines, as well as the multibillion-dollar program that covers the immunization of almost half the nation’s children.

Which is to say that America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic could have the power to upend, derail, or otherwise louse up a cornerstone of public health. Raising U.S. vaccination rates to where they are today took decades of investment: In 1991, for example, just 82 percent of toddlers were getting measles shots; by 2019, that number had increased to 92 percent. The first Trump administration actually presided over the historic high point for the nation’s immunization services; now the second may be focused on promoting vaccines’ alleged hidden harms. Kennedy has said that he doesn’t want to take any shots away, but even if he were to emphasize “choice,” his leadership would be a daunting test of Americans’ commitment to vaccines.

In many ways, the situation is unprecedented: No one with Kennedy’s mix of inexperience and paranoid distrust has ever held the reins at HHS. He was trained as a lawyer and has no training in biostatistics or any other research bona fides—the sorts of qualifications you’d expect from someone credibly evaluating vaccine efficacy. But the post-pandemic era has already given rise to at least one smaller-scale experiment along these lines. In Florida, vaccine policies have been overseen since 2021 by another noted skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. (Kennedy has likened Ladapo to Galileo—yes, the astronomer who faced down the Roman Inquisition.) Under Ladapo’s direction, the state has aggressively resisted federal guidance on COVID-19 vaccination, and its department of health has twice advised Floridians not to get mRNA-based booster shots. “These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Ladapo declared in January. His public-health contrarianism has also started spilling over into more routine immunization practices. Last winter, during an active measles outbreak at a Florida school, Ladapo abandoned standard practice and allowed unvaccinated children to attend class. He also seemed to make a point of not recommending measles shots for any kids who might have needed them.

Jeffrey Goldhagen, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida and the former head of the Duval County health department, believes that this vaccine skepticism has had immense costs. “The deaths and suffering of thousands and thousands of Floridians” can be linked to Ladapo’s policies, he said, particularly regarding COVID shots. But in the years since Ladapo took office, Florida did not become an instant outlier in terms of COVID vaccination numbers, nor in terms of age-adjusted rates of death from COVID. And so far at least, the state’s performance on other immunization metrics is not far off from the rest of America’s. That doesn’t mean Florida’s numbers are good: Among the state’s kindergarteners, routine-vaccination rates have dropped from 93.3 percent for the kids who entered school in the fall of 2020 to 88.1 percent in 2023, and the rate at which kids are getting nonmedical exemptions from vaccine requirements went up from 2.7 to 4.5 percent over the same period. These changes elevate the risk of further outbreaks of measles, or of other infectious diseases that could end up killing children—but they’re not unique to Ladapo’s constituents. National statistics have been moving in the same direction. (To wit: The rate of nonmedical exemptions across the U.S. has gone up by about the same proportion as Florida’s.)

All of these disturbing trends may be tied to a growing suspicion of vaccines that was brought on during COVID and fanned by right-wing influencers. Or they could be a lingering effect of the widespread lapse in health care in 2020, during which time many young children were missing doses of vaccines. (Kids who entered public school in 2023 might still be catching up.)

In any case, other vaccination rates in Florida look pretty good. Under Ladapo, the state has actually been gaining on the nation as a whole in terms of flu shots for adults and holding its own on immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in toddlers. Even Ladapo’s outlandish choice last winter to allow unvaccinated kids back into a school with an active measles outbreak did not lead to any further cases of disease. In short, as I noted back in February, Ladapo’s anti-vaccine activism has had few, if any, clear effects. (Ladapo did not respond when I reached out to ask why his policies might have failed to sabotage the state’s vaccination rates.)

  

If Florida’s immunization rates have been resilient, then America’s may hold up even better in the years to come. That’s because the most important vaccine policies are made at the state and local levels, Rupali Limaye, a professor and scholar of health behavior at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Each state decides whether and how to mandate vaccines to school-age children, or during a pandemic. The states and localities are then responsible for giving out (or choosing not to give out) whichever vaccines are recommended, and sometimes paid for, by the federal government.  

But the existence of vaccine-skeptical leadership in Washington, and throughout the Republican Party, could still end up putting pressure on local decision makers, she continued, and could encourage policies that support parental choice at the expense of maximizing immunization rates. As a member of the Cabinet, Kennedy would also have a platform that he’s never had before, from which he can continue to spread untruths about vaccines. “If you start to give people more of a choice, and they are exposed to disinformation and misinformation, then there is that propensity of people to make decisions that are not based on evidence,” Limaye said. (According to The New York Times, many experts say they “worry most” about this aspect of Kennedy’s leadership.)

How much will this really matter, though? The mere prominence of Kennedy’s ideas may not do much to drive down vaccination rates on its own. Noel Brewer, a behavioral scientist and public-health professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, told me that attempts to change people’s thoughts and feelings about vaccines are often futile; research shows that talking up the value of getting shots has little impact on behavior. By the same token, one might reasonably expect that talking down the value of vaccines (as Kennedy and Ladapo are wont to do) would be wasted effort too. “It may be that having a public figure talking about this has little effect,” Brewer said.

Indeed, much has been made of Kennedy’s apparent intervention during the 2019 measles crisis in Samoa. He arrived there for a visit in the middle of that year, not long after measles immunizations had been suspended, and children’s immunization rates had plummeted. (The crisis began when two babies died from a vaccine-related medical error in 2018.) Kennedy has been linked to the deadly measles outbreak in the months that followed, but if his presence really did give succor to the local anti-vaccine movement, that movement’s broader aims were frustrated: The government declared a state of emergency that fall, and soon the measles-vaccination rate had more than doubled.

As head of HHS, though, Kennedy would have direct control over the federal programs that do the sort of work that has been necessary in Samoa, and provide access to vaccines to those who need them most. For example, he’d oversee the agencies that pay for and administer Vaccines for Children, which distributes shots to children in every state. All the experts I spoke with warned that interference with this program could have serious consequences. Other potential actions, such as demanding further safety studies of vaccines and evidence reviews, could slow down decision making and delay the introduction of new vaccines.

Kennedy would also have a chance to influence the nation’s vaccine requirements for children, as well as its safety-and-monitoring system, at the highest levels. He’d be in charge of selecting members for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on vaccines that are usually adopted by the states and result in standardized insurance coverage. He’d also oversee the head of the CDC, who in turn has the authority to overrule or amend individual ACIP recommendations.

Even if he’s not inclined to squelch any determinations outright, Kennedy’s goal of giving parents latitude might play out in other ways. Brewer, who is currently a voting member of ACIP (but emphasized that he was not speaking in that capacity), said that the committee can issue several different types of rulings, some of which roughly correspond to ACIP saying that Americans should rather than may get a certain vaccine. That distinction can be very consequential, Brewer said: Shots that are made “routine” by ACIP get prioritized in doctor’s offices, for instance, while those that are subject to “shared clinical decision-making” may be held for patients who ask for them specifically. Shifting the country’s vaccination program from a should to a may regime “would destroy uptake,” Brewer told me.

Those would seem to be the stakes. The case study of vaccine-skeptical governance that we have in Florida may not look so dire—at least in the specifics. But Kennedy’s ascendancy could be something more than that: He could steer the public-health establishment off the course that it’s been on for many years, and getting back to where we are today could take more years still.

When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?

A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.

[Read: The cowardice of open letters]

Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher.  

I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.

I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.

I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.

But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.

Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.

That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.

When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?

Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.

For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.

[Read: When writers silence writers]

Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.

Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.

But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.

Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”

Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.

Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.

Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”

Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.

“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”

Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.

Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.

Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.

The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.

“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]

Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”

Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.

Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.

Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?

This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.

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In the decade since Donald Trump began to define American politics, critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. They have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses. Who else but Sigmund Freud to help explain? “The past few years,” the academic and critic Merve Emre wrote in an essay for The New Yorker this past June, “have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.” History has now given us another iteration: a Freud for the Trump movement.

Consensus on the causes of Trump’s sweeping electoral victory has formed around the idea that voters were responding to Democratic performance on material matters, namely inflation and immigration. But the Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.

Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently, “is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.

[Read: Washington is shocked]

The temptation to psychologize one’s political opponents typically wins out after defeat, the political theorist and professor Corey Robin told me recently. (An easy claim to test: Among the surge of post-election takes is a subgenre of explanatory pieces evaluating the psyches of unexpected Trump voters—suggestions that Latinos are wedded to political strongmen, or that conservative wives cast their votes for right-wingers purely out of fear or submission.) In those periods, “Freud is mobilized to explain why the left failed—not because of institutions or specific forms of economic power or the Cold War, etc., but instead because of psychic structures that the left never really touched,” Robin said. Freud offers something more than simply assigning diagnoses to opponents: “an archaeology of the mind,” Robin told me, that aims to unearth emotions and desires that people aren’t necessarily aware of themselves.

That sort of excavation can be useful. Freud helps in forming an account of what people are drawn to in Trump—what pleasure, what gratification. Gary Greenberg, a writer and psychotherapist, argued in a 2018 Guardian essay that Trump is a figure who beckons America back to prior states of development—an indicator that the death drive is at work. Trump, Greenberg wrote, “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign energies to express themselves in action. There’s a certain pleasure in that, perhaps, a kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.

Today’s left-of-center would also be wise to consider what Freud might teach them about countering an appeal like Trump’s. In an essay published in Jacobin shortly before the election, the author and psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart argued that liberals have still failed to reckon with the psychological tendencies Freud identified that facilitate mass political movements like those of the president-elect. “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,” Reinhart wrote. This doesn’t mean indulging those feelings—rather, it means offering a politics built to contain them. “To craft an effective liberal or left politics, we must stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable and own up to the persistent reality of destructive human tendencies that manifest not only around Trump but also in countless contexts throughout history,” Reinhart wrote.

[Read: What to read if you’re angry about the election]

Freudian psychoanalysis has, in the past several decades, faded from a feverish mid-century peak. In 1960, psychoanalysts occupied the majority of psychiatry positions in the United States, but the latter half of the century saw the advent of a vituperative discursive conflict over the validity of some of Freud’s key claims and the credibility of psychoanalysis as an effective, scientific method of clinical treatment. The debate raged across disciplines—by that time, Freud and the psychoanalytic model had been absorbed into numerous other fields, including literature, politics, and sociology. And though psychoanalytic treatment has been largely replaced by more familiar forms of psychiatric care, such as psychopharmacology (the treatment of mental illness with medication) and standardized therapy, Freud’s contributions remain useful.

Psychoanalyzing one’s enemies always comes with a certain degree of condescension, which is unfortunate, because the Freudian lens is an egalitarian approach so long as its advocates recognize that they, too, are ruled by motivations they cannot easily recognize or define. “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936, “the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” I believe this insight bears wide application: I’m affected enough by vibes and instincts to believe that some part of my mind beneath my conscious thoughts plays an important role in my day-to-day life and decision making, and I suspect the same is true of others. It seems to me that avid Trump support must be anchored in such parts. In that case, whatever explains the Trump movement has in some sense always been with us and has visited us historically before; let’s pray that this time, the fever breaks quickly.

A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

It’s become one of the most important rites of passage in the book-publication process—more meaningful to some writers than a book party or book-cover reveal. For many authors, in fact, no book deal is complete until they’ve posted it.

It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book.

Search for “Publishers Marketplace” on Instagram or X or Threads and you’ll find hundreds upon hundreds of examples. The authors who are sharing deal announcements represent almost every genre: children’s lit, grown-up thrillers, BookTok-influencer bisexual rom-coms, and all points between. Some posts are pretty minimal—the screengrab, a caption, perhaps a touch of winking irony to deflect from appearing too braggy. Others are unabashedly earnest in their enthusiasm, comporting the anachronistic typeface of Publishers Marketplace into new-media forms: dancing around it enthusiastically in a TikTok green screen, posting it alongside baby photos of themselves. (“My entire life has been about reaching my unreachable dreams,” reads one.)

Authors have built their own galaxies of exalted cultural meaning out of the Publishers Marketplace deal-announcement screengrab—perhaps even more now, in an environment where anyone can self-publish independently. A significant number of Americans claim that they someday want to write a book. A commonly cited New York Times opinion piece from 2002 pegs it at upwards of 80 percent; more recent polling found that “more than half” of Americans have an idea for a novel. A deal is irrefutable evidence of the closest thing to employment that a would-be author can achieve. It’s proof that the novel they’ve been working on for years hasn’t just been a hobby; now it’s officially a job (though sometimes a job barely begun—deals can be made on the basis of a sample chapter).

Once the rarefied air of authorial status has been attained, today’s “Publishers Marketplace Official” writers (that’s the going phrase on social media) can safely perform the ad hoc public role of The Author online. Some even share their own Publishers Marketplace–themed fan merch. Custom mugs seem especially popular; at least one publishing company, Avid Reader (a division of Simon & Schuster), offers a Publishers Marketplace–screengrab mug as part of its new-author welcome package.

Social media is ostensibly a form of publicity, a way to generate buzz for a book. But the deal post likely does very little to move copies. David Black, the founder of the eponymous New York literary agency known for representing hundreds of authors across genres, points out that many publication dates are usually years away from deal announcements. “In terms of sales,” he told me, “the impact is not great.” The post, instead, has become the visual icon of the modern literary era, an illustration of the anxieties, expectations, and terminal onlineness of being an author today.

Publishers Marketplace has been in business since the early 2000s, a literary-world counterpart to trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, which have covered film- and TV-industry business dealings for the past century or so. Today, the Bronxville, New York–based book-market site, billed as “essential” daily reading, operates with a modest crew of just five full-time employees. Every year, it announces about 14,000 unique book deals, which can be accessed using a $25-a-month membership model (popular with professionals in the field, such as agents and editors, who use it to monitor the publishing industry in real time), or a $10 “Quick Pass” that lasts 24 hours—ideal for those who just want to access and screenshot their own deal announcement once.  

Every book deal—whether the humblest indie or the industry-shaking eight-figure multibook contract with international rights—is formatted the same way: The book’s title is listed in a large font on top, followed by the name of the author(s), the publisher, and then a single paragraph containing essential information about the book in question, including the names of the agent and acquiring editor. Industry professionals are fluent in its secret language, which can include terms such as good deal and very good deal to indicate the range of dollar amounts offered for each book as an advance payment. As with a tombstone in the mergers-and-acquisitions business, there is an insider lingua franca that casual followers wouldn’t know.  

[Read: How to write a book without losing your mind]

For many authors and their social-media followers, such nuances matter less than the fact that a deal was secured at all. In the early days, typically agents with a Publishers Marketplace subscription would take a screenshot and share it with authors, who would place it on Facebook or what was then Twitter. Today, Instagram appears to be the dominant platform (despite Publishers Marketplace itself having no active presence on the app). Michael Cader, who founded Publishers Marketplace, said the staff is aware of the importance the site has gained on social media. In 2020, the company even started offering a ready-made “screengrab” click option that produces a version of a deal-announcement image for posting with a single click. “We know some authors think of it as a mark of arrival,” he told me, “and we are honored to be able to help them memorialize and share their achievements.”

I spoke with multiple writers working in diverse genres about the phenomenon, and they were, let’s just say, a bit reticent about describing posting habits. Asking writers about what they do on social media is like asking someone whether they color their hair or are taking Ozempic—the details can feel embarrassing, even if the behavior itself is commonplace.  

One of the top posts I saw on Instagram for Publishers Marketplace is this one by June CL Tan, an international best-selling author of contemporary young-adult fantasy novels, including Darker by Four. She told me that “Publishers Marketplace Official” really does have meaning as the first time that a book enters the public sphere. Trying to sell a book can take years, and the timing varies from author to author, project to project—and “many, if not most, authors suffer from imposter syndrome,” she said. “Seeing the screengrab or the announcement on Publishers Marketplace does feel more official, as it can act as evidence that the deal is really happening.” The journalist Jason Diamond, who announced the sale of his first novel in April, told me the post also externalizes what otherwise can feel like an isolating endeavor. “I don’t want to sound like a sad bastard,” he told me, “but being a writer can be a very lonely profession.”

Deep down—or not even that deep down—people also see the post as a kind of status symbol, a “club jacket,” as various people told me. “Writing a book is really fucking hard,” Black said. “For some people, this kind of announcement is helpful because it carves out their place in the world.”

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I’m convinced that the website itself, largely unchanged since the early 2000s, is the secret sauce to this whole thing: The naive, disarming, Web 1.0 charm of the Publishers Marketplace screengrab cuts through the ambient friction of our extremely online 21st-century lives, arriving as something rare, authentic, and complete. Though verily the modern publishing industry is changing—and self-publishing on Amazon and other platforms is thriving—many authors are still attached to the markers of success that they remember from the pre-digital era. They’re chasing the feeling they get the first time they see their very own book at the library, in airport bookshops, on newspaper best-seller lists—things that they remember about the books they grew up reading. The post’s old-fashioned look is a dopamine hit to an author’s heart: What could be more tethered to tradition than the act of writing a novel, an art form that first became broadly popular in the 19th century?

The post is, of course, also a utilitarian initiation into what it means to be an author online—that is, self-promotional. Today’s writers are ever more expected to turn themselves into brands. Noah Galuten, a James Beard Award–winning cookbook author (we share an agent), told me that he finds something “very performative” about the post. Yet it’s also, simply, what is required in today’s market. “Cynically, if I see someone posting that, I don’t know—it seems a little thirsty,” Galuten said. “But if I do know you, then I’m happy for you … Like, what else am I supposed to post? A picture of myself cheering or signing a contract like an athlete?” Though the Publishers Marketplace post may not directly correlate to sales, it is a practical place to start the self-marketing journey, to make consumers out of followers.

Which gets at what really makes the post such a big deal: So many people claim to be working on a book, but getting paid for it matters. It’s what turns a writer into an author.

Or so authors like to think. “After you make this post, what then?” Black, the agent, said. “You still have to do the work.” After all, once the deal’s procured, the book must still be edited; sometimes it hasn’t been finished yet. But even if that next great American novel you so cheekily shared via screengrab fails to materialize—well, you might have to pay back the advance. Online, though, you’ll still always be Publishers Marketplace Official.

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