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Articles by Mark Greif
The Meaning of Life
There is the dream of an alternate aesthetic, of a world in which aestheticized experience worked only on things that were ordinary, local, small, repetitive, and recalcitrant, on things that really did happen to most of us in the everyday. This would imply a challenge to drama as we know it.
The Fork in the Road | Mark Greif
In historical terms, the events we are witnessing are an attempt at Gleichschaltung. The Nazi term is usually translated “coordination,” sometimes “consolidation” or “streamlining.” In this phase of totalitarianism, the Movement, now elected to power, uses its hold on the legitimate authority of the state to try, illegitimately, to align neutral, nonpartisan, or independent institutions with the extra-state Movement, forging an obligation to the Leader rather than to the constitutional state.
The Fork in the Road
In historical terms, the event we are witnessing is an attempt at Gleichschaltung. The Nazi term is usually translated “coordination,” sometimes “consolidation” or “streamlining.” In this phase of totalitarianism, the Movement, now elected to power, uses its hold on the legitimate authority of the state to try, illegitimately, to align neutral, nonpartisan, or independent institutions with the extra-state Movement, forging an obligation to the Leader rather than to the constitutional state.
The Fork in the Road | Mark Greif
In historical terms, the event we are witnessing is an attempt at Gleichschaltung. The Nazi term is usually translated “coordination,” sometimes “consolidation” or “streamlining.” In this phase of totalitarianism, the Movement, now elected to power, uses its hold on the legitimate authority of the state to try, illegitimately, to align neutral, nonpartisan, or independent institutions with the extra-state Movement, forging an obligation to the Leader rather than to the constitutional state.
Glimmers of Totality
Discussed in this essay: Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, by Fredric Jameson. Verso. 272 pages. $34.95. It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen.
Opinion | The Best Scholarly Books of 2023
Happy New Year, dear readers of The Review! As we do each year, we convened a group of our contributors — a dozen, this time around — and asked them which works of scholarship surprised, challenged, thrilled, or impressed them most in 2023. (In a few cases, these books were published in 2022, or even 2021 — but who are we to quibble?) The selections were typically eclectic, covering a range of subjects and locales, from punk clubs in Mexico to avant-garde film festivals in Uzbekistan.
Inside Jennifer Egan’s Fiction Factory
In 2010, Jennifer Egan published A Visit From the Goon Squad. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, suggesting esteem among populists and highbrows alike. Commentators praised its combination of technical virtuosity—the intricate cogs and wheels that connected plotlines across time and geography—and sentimental “heart,” a wistful emotional atmosphere piped in like a gas to keep the mechanism from rusting.
Review: ‘The Transcendentalists and Their World,’ by Robert Gross
Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, emerged from an exceptionally tight-knit community. In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence in 1976, a graduate student sent a proposal to an editor at a trade publisher in New York. Would he consider taking on a book about the Minutemen and their “shot heard round the world,” set painstakingly in a history of Concord, Massachusetts, the town where the North Bridge fight broke out?
Emerson Never Practiced the Self-Reliance He Preached
In the lead-up to the bicentennial of American independence in 1976, a graduate student sent a proposal to an editor at a trade publisher in New York. Would he consider taking on a book about the Minutemen and their “shot heard round the world,” set painstakingly in a history of Concord, Massachusetts, the town where the North Bridge fight broke out? In 1977, that book—which was also the student’s dissertation—won a Bancroft Prize, the highest honor in the history profession.
A Monumental New Study of Cold War Culture
Louis menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over. It seems like the right gift for the graduating college senior this year.
Review: ‘The Free World’ by Louis Menand
This article was published online on May 5, 2021. Louis Menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over. It seems like the right gift for the graduating college senior this year.
You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel
Last month, the television show Mad Men won the Emmy Award in the United States for best drama series, putting it in the company of The Sopranos, Lost and 24. Like those other programmes, Mad Men has a long, unfolding storyline, costs millions of dollars per episode to make, and seems largely intended for home-recording or DVD viewers, who will trouble to watch it in sequence.
The Reality of Reality Television
There is a persistent dream that television will be more than it is: that it will not only sit in every home, but make a conduit for those homes to reach back to a shared fund of life. The utopia of television nearly came within reach in 1992, on the day cable providers announced that cable boxes would expand to 500 channels. Back then, our utopian idea rested on assumptions both right and wrong. We assumed network-sized broadcasters could never afford new programming for so many active channels.
September 2004 | Harper's Magazine
Readings 11-29 PDF [Article] The fit and the dead· = Subscribers only. Sign in here. Subscribe here. By Mark Greif [Article] If You Build It . . . By Sam Frank [illustration] Waiting· = Subscribers only. Sign in here. Subscribe here. By Sean Yelland (Artist/illustrator) [Article] Controlling the house· = Subscribers only. Sign in here. Subscribe here. By Susan Hampstead [illustration] Untitled tower· = Subscribers only. Sign in here. Subscribe here.
On the Mueller Report, Vol. 1
For two years we knew of the possibility that the Donald Trump campaign cheated in the 2016 election. Investigative journalists reported that members of the Trump campaign, individually and severally, learned that the Russian government was trying to intervene in the election in their favor, and that they welcomed and encouraged the attack; they may even have tried to help it.
Ben Lerner’s novel of family, male rage, and the roots of the new Right
Ben Lerner’s novel of family, male rage, and the roots of the new Right The Topeka School BY Ben Lerner. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 304 pages. $27. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon At the midpoint of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love occurs one of the really extraordinary hidden scenes in English literature. Ursula and Gudrun are the young protagonists, figuring out their ambitions, their loves, and their futures.
On The Mueller Report, Vol. 1
For two years we knew of the possibility that the Donald Trump campaign cheated in the 2016 election. Investigative journalists reported that members of the Trump campaign, individually and severally, learned that the Russian government was trying to intervene in the election in their favor, and that they welcomed and encouraged the attack; they may even have tried to help it.
Mark Greif reviews ‘Reborn’ by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff · LRB 12 February 2009
One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Other postwar American writers who cut the same sort of public figure pleaded with you to love their outsized faults, embrace their dumb enthusiasms, and cast in your lot with theirs through recounted divorces, nervous breakdowns, lusts. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior. Sontag made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. That cost little enough.
Mark Greif reviews ‘Walt Disney’ by Neal Gabler, ‘The Animated Man’ by Michael Barrier and ‘Drawing the Line’ by Tom Sito · LRB 7 June 2007
At an early point in his career, probably no later than 1930, Walt Disney lost the ability to draw what he wanted his cartoon characters to look like or his animations to do. So he began to act his cartoons out.
Was Saul Bellow a Man or a Jerk? Both, a Monumental Biography Concludes (Published 2018)
Nonfiction Saul Bellow on a New York City subway train in 1975. Dec. 5, 2018 THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW Love and Strife, 1965-2005 By Zachary Leader Illustrated. 767 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $40. This is a superb biography. Yet it begins in the most inauspicious place. It is 1964, and Saul Bellow has just become absurdly rich and famous.
Circling
When the reality show Shark Tank premiered on ABC in August 2009, US unemployment was at a twenty-six-year high and still climbing. Today, the jobless rate has dropped off from those dire altitudes—somewhat—but this reflects a withered labor force more than it does any true economic revival.
Postcards from DC
I am standing beside a small male cop. It’s four days before the Kavanaugh vote, and we still have a kind of hope or momentum from the encounter with Flake, the one that went viral. I look into the small cop’s eyes and say, “You like that we’re here. Admit it.” I am part of a pack of bird-dogs, putting politicians on the spot. We wear purple stickers that say Believe Survivors, so you know who we are, except you would know anyway from the fact we are standing around instead of rushing along blindly.
A Trained Pigeon
It’s proving difficult to stop thinking about the testimonies last week. Four hours of questions to a citizen named Christine Blasey Ford. Four hours of questions, of a sort, to Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the second highest court in the United States. The woman lives quietly as a professor of psychology and surfer in Northern California. The man has never left Washington, DC, and helps decide the law of the land.
Dispatches From Guerrero
To lose your hair, to lose control, You know, to lose valuable time, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To lose blood, your father and mother, The heart you lost in Heidelberg, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To lose, again and again to lose, Even illusions lost a long time ago.
What's Wrong With Public Intellectuals?
For years, the undigitized gem of American journals had been Partisan Review. Last year its guardians finally brought it online. Some of its mystery has been preserved, insofar as its format remains hard to use, awkward, and hopeless for searches. Even in its new digital form it retains a slightly superior pose. The great importance of Partisan Review did not arise recently from its inaccessibility.
Cavell as Educator
“To poor students” Profess What can I profess? The age of new doctrines has closed. The role of a professor may be to confess to what is already known. Thus one professes an established faith, as an adherent. But to what, or whom, could I cling? Is there any single thing, learned in school, that you can stick to for a lifetime? The professor of philosophy stands at the junction of two worlds: the original and the rote. Emerson teased the scholar, calling him a divided philosopher.
A New Struggle Coming
Sitting in Durham, North Carolina this week, I’ve been thinking about Calhoun County, West Virginia, where I grew up. The teachers there and in the state’s fifty-four other counties are out on a wildcat strike until they get something resembling decent pay and real health insurance. Some of the teachers in the Calhoun high school where I spent three years were splendid. More were at least diligent.
'Against Everything' Captures Mark Grief's Journey Towards Transformation
The problem with time-sensitive topics like social networks, reality TV, or even the concept of the Hipster in the observational essay, is that they demand updates. Mark Greif covers these topics (and more) in Against Everything: Essays. While they are at their surface level observational, Greif retains a critical academic distance from such topics and specific subjects. Sometimes Greif's insistence on maintaining the professionalism of the pontificator can exhaust the reader. Where is he going?
Against Exercise by Mark Greif
Were “In the Penal Colony” to be written today, Kafka could only be speaking of an exercise machine. Instead of the sentence to be tattooed on its victims, the machine would inscribe lines of numbers. So many calories, so many miles, so many watts, so many laps. Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself. Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym. The lever of the die press no longer commands us at work.
The Case of the Skeptical Pragmatist | by Christopher Benfey
These are dark times for the humanities, or so we are often told. We have had the melancholy litany drilled into us: the best students are gravitating to the sciences; funding for nonscientific research is drying up; good jobs are scarce for graduates with degrees in English or art history. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, the humanities! So shrill are the jeremiads that one might think the fate of humanity itself is somehow at stake in the decline of English departments.
The Hype Cycle | Issue 6 | n+1
The Intellectual Situation The Editors The Hype Cycle By now everyone is familiar with the hype cycle. You know the drill: the ginned-up enthusiasm of publicists combines with word of mouth (and blog) to create so-called buzz. Articles appear, posing one of three questions. For the new artist: is this the next big thing? For the established artist (or restaurateur): will stratospheric expectations be met? For the figure whose stock is down: can a comeback be staged?
Widerstand gegen Trump: Ausflippen! Jetzt!
Präsident Obama sollte nicht weiter von einem „reibungslosen Übergang“ sprechen, sondern den Übergang zu Trump so holprig wie möglich und so rau wie Sandpapier gestalten. Die Clintons sollten ihre Zusage, an der Inauguration teilzunehmen, zurückziehen. Nehmen wir uns ein Beispiel an den Hollywoodschauspielern und Comedians, die sich in Twitter-Schlachten mit Trump stürzen.
Criticism in the Twilight
The pathos of critics—and don’t they know it—is that their particular opinions, and even their general systems of belief, are usually doomed to quick oblivion. They observe the canonical, but they publish in pages that wilt. They write from a position of developed taste, but they also have to turn around pieces on deadline. Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth The seductiveness of criticism is that this doesn’t necessarily matter.
Criticism in the Twilight
This article appears in the December 5-12, 2016 issue. The pathos of critics—and don’t they know it—is that their particular opinions, and even their general systems of belief, are usually doomed to quick oblivion. They observe the canonical, but they publish in pages that wilt. They write from a position of developed taste, but they also have to turn around pieces on deadline. The seductiveness of criticism is that this doesn’t necessarily matter.
Welcome to the Shiva
Melissa didn’t sleep. Which means I didn’t sleep. She wasn’t up waiting for the results. She was lying awake in grief and fear. A lot of women cried today. There’s a room at her high school called the Harbor, a sort of permanent lounge for those having trouble coping at school. Madame Albert went to the Harbor. Her students called on her late in the day. Was Madame Albert really in tears? She was, and she is. Now she is standing before me, shaking her iPhone.
No President
Nothing good comes of this. Donald Trump’s success in the presidential contest is another low point for the Republic. Unfortunately, we’re the ones who have to be here for this particular passage of history, and this disaster will now waste our time and energy. Politics is grim business when there are no particular rewards in sight. No improvements, and only tottering supports to buttress. For the time being many Americans may have to be political to an unusual degree and political in a new way.
November 9 | Online Only | n+1
Donald Trump’s election is such a rupture in political life that I have been suspicious even of my urge to understand it. In conversation yesterday, in email threads, in the private glow of my computer screen, I tried to draw a lesson from this disaster. I read articles about exit polls, considered the Rust Belt, weighed gender against race.
Disqualified | Online Only | n+1
In the 1960s pundits liked to ask why, if their lives were already so bad, black people in the “ghetto” still burned down their own neighborhoods. As Robert Putnam has demonstrated, the economic state (if not the subjection to mass incarceration and police violence) of white working-class America is now close to that of their non-white analogues. By this light, the election of Trump might be understood as an electoral riot. What to do?
The Election | Online Only | n+1
November 16, 2016 The Election Philip Connors The places I call home have been targeted for the ash heap of history. If Trump has his way on climate policy, the forests of the Southwest—already in grave peril—are finished. If Trump has his way on border policy, an ever more militarized atmosphere is destined to overlay the life of the borderlands. November 13, 2016 The Election The gallows humor isn’t even funny. Daniel Albert November 13, 2016 The Election Eli S.
How a Philosophy Professor Found Love in a Hidden Library
This is the dramatic plot of “American Philosophy: A Love Story.” The pleasure of this unusual work, however, and the bulk of its pages, belong to short biographical accounts and reflections on the philosophers, poets, novelists and even bygone political figures whose volumes Kaag finds on the Hocking library shelves.
Good Greif: In His Essay Collection, a Founding Editor of n+1 Questions Everything
Looking back twelve years to the inaugural issue of the literary journal n+1, what stands out is just how much the founders had to say. And no one more so than Mark Greif, who authored four of the volume's essays (and co-authored a fifth). From an indictment of exercise to a discourse on the mutilation of American soldiers, the pieces show Greif as a ranging enthusiast rather than a cloistered scholar. It's not exactly clear, however, what he's so enthusiastic about.
Oh, the Humanities
In a 2005 essay for the New York Times Magazine, the critic A. O. Scott considered two recent and rather quixotic decisions, made in parallel by rival camps of young writers, to devise print magazines. One was The Believer, inaugurated in 2003 by Dave Eggers’s independent San Francisco publishing house McSweeney’s, and the other was n+1.
Against Everything by Mark Greif | PenguinRandomHouse.com
“The truth is that Greif, as we come to know him in these essays, is a deeply hopeful thinker, full of visions of a better, even perfect, world. His disciplined, thoughtful critiques of all manner of cultural phenomena—from YouTube videos to the mania for exercise—rest on an intuition that the world we have been given is not good enough…To argue this point with Against Everything is not to dismiss Greif’s achievement, but the reverse.
A Wedding From Hell
The theme of the night was “a wedding from hell.” I tuned in late, missing the national anthem, but just in time for the dancing, which I watched with a mixture of embarrassment and ire. The portly delegates wiggled and two-stepped in that white-person, clap-on-the-on-beat way to “Eight Days a Week” by the Beatles. A coded proposal, perhaps, to extend the work week? A reach, but I was still warming up.
Europe’s Hamilton Moment
From “How Germany Reconquered Europe,” published in the February 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Read the full article here. Subscribe to Harper’s Magazine for access to our entire 166-year archive. Jeff Madrick authored Harper’s Anti-Economist column; James K. Galbraith is the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B.
Genius | [Readings] | American Idle, by Mark Greif | Harper's Magazine
By Mark Greif, from Against Everything, a collection of his essays that will be published in September by Pantheon. Greif is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man and is a founding editor of n+1. Reality television over the recent decade has shown a United States of people selling one another, in the form of a vast trade in junk, the last remains of our patrimony. The past has become no more than the chance that something in the attic will be valuable to a rich buyer.
What Was the Hipster?
Discussion of: A critical history of our era's most controversial archetype, beginning with the sleazy, mocking late-nineties fetishization of lower-middle-class whiteness and ending, perhaps, with political and artistic enlightenment. ... Read the story
Trump and the Republicans
In the 1950s, a more sedate time in American party politics, a piece of folk wisdom held that Republicans washed their laundry indoors while Democrats hung it all out on the line. No longer. Donald Trump’s Republican opponents deem him, nearly in the same breath, an avatar of dark forces—as if a party playing on racial fears for fifty years were some kind of innocent—and an apostate against true conservatism.
On Repressive Sentimentalism
Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.
The Best Things We Read in 2015
We certainly read a lot of bad things this year—but we also read a bunch of stuff that was great. Here are our picks for the best books, essays, articles and Urban Baby blog posts of 2015. Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command by Sean Naylor Even if you don’t care about military history, there are so many true yet impossible-sounding and confounding anecdotes of waste, mismanagement, incompetence, and incredibly poor planning in here to make it worthwhile.
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