Dayna Tortorici

I did this and it's wildly entertaining and yes I bought a book.

We’re already halfway through Bookmatch! Take the quiz before it’s gone.

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Debs, Nehru, Mamdani | J. K. Mehta, José Sanchez, Nikil Saval, Colin Vanderburg “I am a democratic socialist.” These words were really spoken by an American politician on live TV, just hours after being elected to govern a city with a population greater than that of all but twelv...

Parochial when he needed to be, in victory Mamdani was borderless, gesturing to so many of the countries whose emigrants populated New York City. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

🚨 Bookmatch is back! 🚨 From now until December 2, make a donation of any amount to n+1 and we’ll send you the Bookmatch quiz—a personality test that will generate a reading list tailored to your tastes and whims. Try the quiz here: secure.givelively.org/donate/n1-fo...

The @nplusonemag.com book match quiz is funny--I even cackled--and then the book recommendations included 3 favorites. A good time for a good cause: secure.givelively.org/donate/n1-fo...

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

This essay bangs. It gets at a specific problem with how AI is being sold to us--or how the industry is getting us to sell it to ourselves-- that I haven't seen described this clearly anywhere. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

All the reasons not to give in to generative AI.

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

Experiences in Groups | Lily Scherlis The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someon...

“Within the experimental enclosure, you say things you didn’t think you could possibly say. Then you see others see you saying them, and then you do it again.” Now out from behind the paywall: @lilyscherlis.bsky.social on group relations.
www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/ess...

Experiences in Groups | Lily Scherlis The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someon...

“We will go on like this for two weeks, some of us losing our minds through sheer proximity to other people. The conversation eventually devolves into a kind of libidinal dodgeball.”

@lilyscherlis.bsky.social tries to find out what Bion's group relations has to say about contemporary political life

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

Bless the @nplusonemag.com editors for coining the term "a single-use plastic of the mind" to describe AI

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

This is long, but worth it. Some choice quotes:

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

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Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

"When we use generative AI, we stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts."

www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

(just messaged you on X)

Thank you! Will look into this.

Authority, by Andrea Long Chu A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,”...

AUTHORITY, by the inimitable Andrea Long Chu, is out today from @fsgbooks.bsky.social! shop.nplusonemag.com/products/aut...

Livestream tickets are still available for her launch tomorrow with Arielle Angel—(4/9) at The Center for Fiction, 7PM: centerforfiction.org/event/on-ame...

Inversion of Marcia | Thomas Bolt My sister grabbed a sheet, tripped on it, ran out of the room naked. I stepped back, mouth open. Marcia’s bare feet pounded down the hall. A door slammed. Alicia was naked, too, but she didn’t move. “...

Read Tom’s O. Henry–prize winning short story “Inversion of Marcia” on our website, where we’ve taken all his stories out from behind the paywall: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-27/fic...

Dear readers, On January 21, 2025, n+1 lost a great contributor and friend in Thomas Bolt, who died at the age of 65 after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. Tom published four short stories with n+1: the O. Henry Award–winning “Inversion of Marcia” (2017), “Insurance” (2017), “Estación Origen MADRID” (2018), and “Area of Isolation” (2023). We’ve unpaywalled them all so that more readers can enjoy the exceptional richness and warm, playful intelligence of his writing, and to honor the life of a talent cut off too soon. Tom was a poet as well as a fiction writer, and he brought a poet’s attention to his stories. He was sensitive to rhythm, and to what a choice of punctuation said about the quality of a thought. Regarding a copyediting query about a misstated quotation in “Inversion of Marcia,” he wrote, “Giving Milt the correct Marlowe quotation is fine (though my variant was intentional), since he has just told a story about Greco di Tufo that traces back no further than a 1950s potboiler novel. Milt is reliable and consistent only in his self-indulgence.” The response is classic Tom: the gameliness (fine to change); the suggestion of deeper esoteric knowledge (the 1950s potboiler novel); the investment in his characters (Milt is as real as you or me). It captures that disposition as a writer—deliberate but open, never prickly or obstinate—that made him so wonderful to work with.

My favorite of Tom’s creations is Mary, the 15-year-old protagonist of “Inversion of Marcia” whose near-twin Marcia has abandoned her for the more alluring Alicia, a college-age girl her parents have brought along as a babysitter on their family trip to Italy. Mary’s observations are delivered with a teenager’s slouching exaggeration (she describes Alicia as “taking about four years to slide her leg off the bench” at breakfast), but contain some of Tom’s own perspicacity and sensitivity to history and beauty. Passing an afternoon in Naples, Mary thinks critically about whether the modelesque pose Alicia assumes in public, with her wrists on her hips and her hands open, is an affectation or inborn awkwardness. “Amazing, though, to see the palm trees near the ancient columns,” she pivots. “Pretty obvious where the whole idea for columns had come from, right down to the leafy decorations on top.” I loved working with Tom on these stories, and it’s an honor to share them again, even under these mournful circumstances. I hope you find as much resonance in them as I do. In loving memory, Dayna Tortorici

In today’s newsletter: a note from n+1 coeditor
@dtortorici.bsky.social about our contributor Thomas Bolt, who died last month at age 65.

If you like Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, and Elena Ferrante and have not yet read de Céspedes, you're in for a treat.

Tonight at the 92nd street Y I'll be moderating a conversation about Alba de Céspedes and her debut novel "There's No Looking Back" newly translated into English by Ann Goldstein, with Goldstein, Judith Thurman, and Joanna Biggs! Tickets here: www.92ny.org/event/on-alb...

honestly think some of the hesitation here is that no one wants to sound like a crank. i was talking at an event last night and even i felt like a crank while i was speaking!

According to a senior CDC official, some of the pages that were removed on Friday have been reinstated due to backlash from the scientific community and the public. Keep speaking up, it matters!

DOGE: Dangerous Oligarchs Grab Everything What Marc Andreessen revealed about the tech-industrial complex

When I wrote this 11 days ago, I genuinely did not think they would move this quickly or aggressively, but what we are witnessing is very much state capture
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-dange...

Twitter was a social media website employing 7500 people. The federal government employees ~3 million people and touches every part of your day—roads, planes, schools, healthcare, food safety, Social Security and on and on. We’re going to learn the hard way that we’ve been taking it for granted

How can anyone in their right mind ignore this letter from Caroline Kennedy about her cousin, RFK Jr.?

They Make a Wasteland and Call It Peace | Saree Makdisi The Roman historian Tacitus once chronicled the last speech of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain rousing his troops to resist the foreign invaders of their land. “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they g...

New online: Saree Makdisi on the ceasefire in Gaza.
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Casual Viewing | Will Tavlin A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer...

"Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless." - Will Tavlin via @nplusonemag.com www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/ess...

The @nplusonemag.com essay on the enshittification of Netflix is excellent, but for a palate-cleanser, also check out this smart essay on Radu Jude, whose brilliant & crazy films are the antithesis of the TNM (Typical Netflix Movie)