Theorist and author Lauren Berlant has died at age sixty-three. Berlant was a pioneering scholar in heteronormativity, queer theory, and affect theory, whose 2011 book, Cruel Optimism, was a visionary and influential study of how capitalism and neoliberalism shape human desire. Berlant defined “cruel optimism” as “a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing.” They were the author or coauthor of several more books, including The Female Complaint, Desire/Love, and 2019’s The Hundreds, among other titles. In 2019, they offered an accessible introduction to their work on the Big Brains podcast: “Why Chasing the Good Life is Holding Us Back.” In 2008, Berlant told Cabinet magazine: “It’s part of my queer optimism to say that people are affectively and emotionally incoherent. This suggests that we can produce new ways of imagining what it means to be attached and to build lives and worlds from what’s there already. . . . We are just at the beginning of understanding emotion politically.”
Catapult has named novelist and editor Megha Majumdar as its new editor in chief. Majumdar’s debut novel, A Burning, was published in 2020.
Osita Nwanevu has announced that he’s leaving his position as a New Republic staff writer to work on his forthcoming book The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.
Online at n+1, Daphne Merkin writes about her encounters over the years with Philip Roth (including a marriage proposal), and considers the author’s legacy in light of the allegations against his official biographer Blake Bailey: “While Roth, with his undeniable drawing power, may have captured me in a certain way, I was also aware from the start that this kind of swashbuckling, supremely manipulative man could only break my heart, and that I’d end up like Anne Mudge—the devoted girlfriend who attempted suicide after Roth abruptly ditched her. When this conquistador attitude is imitated and exponentially heightened by men like Bailey, the issue becomes more grave—leading, at its worst, to something much darker.”
Tomorrow at 5pm EDT, McNally Jackson will host Diane Johnson and Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair, for a conversation on Johnson’s latest novel, Lorna Mott Comes Home.