At The Nation, Jennifer Wilson reviews Maggie Nelson’s new book, On Freedom, in which the poet and critic touts indeterminacy in four essays on sex, art, drugs, and the climate crisis. “For all the space she devotes in the book’s introduction to her worries over the right-wing co-optation of ‘liberation’ (as a political slogan, if not an actual politics), the book’s essays tend to find Nelson chiding the left for what she considers its overcorrections and overreaches,” Wilson writes. For more on the book, read Charlotte Shane’s essay in Bookforum.
Alex Shephard, Erin Somers, and Eric Jett are joined by poet Elisa Gabbert and critic Merve Emre in the new episode of Mr. Difficult, a podcast about Jonathan Franzen’s novels. They discuss his latest novel, Crossroads, and The Kraus Project—a work of translation and annotation, and perhaps his least read book. The novelist Nell Zink may make an appearance in a future episode.
In the Los Angeles Times, Seyward Darby writes about how Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking helped Darby cope after the sudden death of her partner: “I read Didion’s memoir in gulps and as fast as I could, baffled and ecstatic to see my own thoughts rendered on the page: the need to detail to myself, again and again, what happened; the toggling between lucidity and fantasy.”
For Commonweal, Morton Høi Jensen considers Andrew Sullivan’s career-spanning essay collection, and his affinity for blogging: “Style, as we know, is not a glaze applied after the fact; it is a substance baked into the worldview that informs the writing. And my sense of Sullivan as a writer, especially as his presence has shifted from traditional print to fiber-optic cables, is that his writing has become increasingly obscured behind an immense digital scaffolding of tweets, blogs, newsletters, videos, diaries—anything, it often seems, but the central medium itself: prose.”
In Poynter, Angela Fu recaps the year in labor organizing for journalists. In 2021, more than 1,500 employees at twenty-six publications joined the NewsGuild, including workers at The Atlantic, Politico, MSNBC, and Forbes.