I’m late in sharing my review for The Nation of Lowry Pressley’s book The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. In the decade-plus (!) since the Snowden leaks—which brought digital surveillance to the public’s consciousness even as said public was walking straight into the tentacles of surveillance capitalism—it has seemed to me that privacy debates have hit a wall. Talking to activists, students, journalists, whistleblowers, a general resigned pessimism reigns. For Pressley, however, privacy is not really about protecting private information and secrets and such, but about protecting a state of affairs about which there is no information at all. I found his account convincing and moving: This is a romantic idea of privacy that is more about temperament than tradecraft, about everything in life that cannot be converted into information. What true privacy allows is a sense of potential, something essential for agency and self-determination. “We need the belief that we can be different going forward,” Pressley writes, “all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.” I added: This is true not only for the individual but for society: We also need such confidence as a collective. To accept that you don’t have to know everything about someone is to trust them (not to look through a partner’s phone, not to install a Ring camera as a doorbell, not to stake an FBI agent outside a Muslim immigrant’s house), and here Pressly’s argument slides between the deeply personal—how can a person be?—and the sociopolitical: How are they allowed to be?

When writing this I was on a Bernadette Mayer kick; it opens with her work “Memory,” from 1971. I’ve also been enjoying her list of journal ideas.

And while I have you, here are a few essays I edited for the new issue of Lux. Natalie Adler’s piece on Tove Jansson will set you off on a Jansson journey if you’ve never taken one already (my son and I are several books deep into the Moomins series. For the grownups, I’ve loved The Summer Book, Notes from an Island, and Fair Play.) I’m also proud of Leila Markosian’s report on the campus dialogue industry—the ballooning business of vague initiatives meant to teach students how not to stand up for anything, it seems. All the more relevant while we wait to see how long Harvard and other schools hold out against the Trump administration.

Sharing a few recent reviews for The New Republic:

In 2022-2023 I was back on the war on terror beat, working for Serial podcast's latest season on Guantánamo. It came out last year, and you can listen to it here. My favorite episodes are the last three, and in truth, those are the ones I had the least to do with, since they were completed after my time there finished. The final two concern the military commissions at Guantánamo and questions of justice and closure, themes I revisited in a review of Emmanuel Carrère's new book V13, for The New Republic. It's a very unusual piece of court reporting, a beautiful book about a brutal subject — the terror attacks in Paris in November, 2015 — and it caused me to think about the way the war on terror has foreclosed the possibility of closure for the 9/11 attacks.

I also wrote recently for TNR about a crop of what I'm calling little motherhood memoirs: mostly short, often fragmented, sometimes quirky books that capture the particular fecundity and frustrations of pregnancy, birth and childrearing. I focused mainly on Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness, and gave Alejandro Zambra, a dad, honorary membership to the club. Having read probably too many such books in these first years of being a parent, I also wrote about how their smallness has me thinking about the literary stakes of the genre, and about Natalia Ginzburg, who once wrote: "I no longer wanted to write like a man, because I had had children and I thought I knew a great many things about tomato sauce and even if I didn't put them into my story it helped my vocation that I knew them.”