I have a complaint

So I have a subscription to The Atlantic Magazine, mostly for their pandemic coverage, which has largely been excellent thanks to Ed Yong and Katherine Wu. It's good enough to make up for a lot of political coverage over the past few years that has made me want to cut somebody, and it's even good enough to make up for some of the most wrongheaded opinion pieces about books and reading that I've subjected myself to in a very long time.

There was one recently by Alyse Burnside regarding cozy mysteries vs. true crime (why does there always have to be a vs and a value judgement?) that wasn't too bad, though I feel like it was the mystery-genre equivalent of those think-pieces about science fiction and fantasy writing that assume that the first book written by a woman was published in 1997 and that "grimdark" is something other than a new name for a marketing category that was old when Harlan Ellison was working it. The truth of the matter is that art that focuses exclusively on the noir aspects of narrative will always be taken more seriously than art that focuses on Happy Things, but as John Gardner rightly points out, both extremes are facile.

It's adolescent to tell ourselves that everything is terrible and we can't do anything about it (and anyway we're the Sexy Antihero so whatever we do will be right in the end Because Protagonist) so we might as well relax and not try to fix things. The best noir (or grimdark, if you prefer) acknowledges that the world is unfair and people are hypocritical, but doesn't valorize that unfairness as an excuse to be terrible, Instead, it interrogates it.

Anyway, that particular article just felt a little facile and dashed off, because it makes the point that escapism comes in a lot of flavors, and serves a purpose, but also it's just kind of a muddled piece without a clear throughline or thesis. (Much like this one, I suppose.)