Abraham Josephine Riesman // Writer

 Mark Doten is a novelist and editor. This interview was conducted on January 23, 2020.

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During Trump’s Iran crisis in January, did you have a mountain of people being like, “Your book’s really happening!” 

I did get a little of that. I mean, what I think has been interesting about Trump, is that it’s been a while since Trump has issued a nuclear threat, which he was really throwing around willy-nilly there for a while. I’m very curious about where that restraint is coming from. Did he just realize — because he seems so unrestrained in so many ways, and he’ll always make the biggest threats possible. So I’m curious how long he can keep that streak going and when he’ll be back to the “fire and fury” talk.

But like, do you have people in your life who read the book and now approach you and go, “How did you know this was going to happen?”

People do say stuff like that. I think it’s — it’s meant in a flattering way, so that’s nice, assuming he doesn’t literally blow up the world, in which case, that won’t help with book sales. But yeah, I think, the book does predict some things about Trump that were … Because there were some pretty clear inklings of the kind of ways he’d be a bad president even before he took office, which includes nonstop grifting, enriching himself and his family, and also his complete inability to accept blame for anything, and his erratic and irrational decision making, and his incredibly thin skin, and his reactiveness. So within that sort of framework, it’s totally possible to dream up any number of Trump scenarios and have some of them come true, and some will not. And he’ll always surprise you. His brain — I’ve used this example before, but his brain is so broken and bad in such specific ways to him that he’ll come up with odd turns of phrase, so that when you’re channelling his voice, there are things you can think of to say that seem very Trumpian, and then there’s other things where he tweeted that everything he did with — I’m trying to remember what the tweet was in reference to — where he referred to some of his actions as “very legal and very cool.” I want to say Russia?

I think it was Russia, FBI something. Who can remember in the mists of time from a year ago.

“Very legal and very cool” doesn’t sound Trumpian until he said it, and now, in retrospect, it does sound Trumpian. And he loves intensifiers like “very.” But I never in a million years would have come up with “very legal and very cool.”

You also never would have come up with, as brilliant as you are, that America has to deal with the three words “perfect phone call” at least seven times a day. A phrase that makes no sense, that no one had ever uttered in a sentence prior to that, and the world seems to hinge on it.

I probably have LexisNexis access through institutions I teach at. You can search some of these things like “perfect phone call,” and I’m sure you’re right. It’s so odd.

How long did it take you to write the 20-odd-page Trump monologue at the end of the book? Is that something that you did in a one sit-down?

I think I wrote it relatively fast. A different version of that, before I’d come up with the Zeppelin idea, appeared in n+1 online, and so I started writing that piece after the Republican convention, when it suddenly seemed like, Oh my God, he might win. And I still didn’t think he was going to win, which is why I assumed that this piece would be just something I’d put in for a story collection or something. But it was still a very frightening moment, and even though there had been so many signs that it was possible he might win, and a lot of people who were smart were like, “This can happen,” I was someone who would look at that snake in The New York Times — they’d have the blue and red — and I’d be like: The snake is nine states over! It’s looking good! But with the convention I did get very terrified, and I wrote the story pretty quickly. I think the immediacy you’re talking about has something to do with the way that Trump’s voice, in the monologue — he’s always kind of a pure reactive surface. So the way he speaks and thinks, it’s very much built as: whatever he’s said will trigger him to talk about something else. So he goes on all these tangents, but they’re all kind of based on whatever he was just saying, as he loses the thread and pings off this way and goes the other way. So, yeah, there’s a movement in his voice that is different from the way that Obama would speak, where he’d speak in paragraphs. Trump doesn’t. He speaks in sentence fragments that ricochet one after the other.

This will sound like a weird comparison, but I’ve been doing some reading lately in my spare time about the composition of the Hebrew Bible and the Quran. And one thing that’s fascinating about them is, we take these books as canonical texts, but when you read them, they’re completely disjointed, they’re all over the place. They don’t fit into a narrative form that we can necessarily recognize in 2020, and yet there’s something primal in them. I keep thinking about Trump when I read about these texts, because I think: Similarly, Trump doesn’t speak in anything resembling a linear fashion, he doesn’t compose a narrative, and yet the people for whom, even the people who don’t like him, you basically get what’s going on. Even though we joke about What the hell is he talking about?, you go, I guess I can follow the internal logic for it, sometimes at least. 

Most of the time.

So, one thing I’d like to ask artists, is, I like to ask this possibly apocryphal story about Philip K. Dick, which is that the origin of The Man in the High Castle was that one day this name popped into his head: “Mr. Tagomi.” He had no idea where it came from, what it was associated with, and he consulted the I Ching, and that was sort of the beginning of the novel. Did you have a Mr. Tagomi moment where one phrase or character or moment appeared, unbidden, in your head? 

I’m trying to think my way back to how … I wrote the libretto for an opera about Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks with the composer Ted Hern that came out in 2014. It was directed by the guy who did the Oklahoma! that’s up now, Daniel Fish. And that was all primary-source stuff, so it was reading Twitter feeds, the leaked chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, and other primary sources, journalists and stuff. So after that project was done and after my first novel had come out and I was sort of casting around for ideas, I thought it might be fun to work again with this composer on something that would be a little more light-hearted and focus on memes and how they evolve and use Twitter and Reddit and 4Chan as the source for these texts. And it turned out not being a project that the composer decided not to pursue that, and I was looking at all these meme texts, and that’s when I started to put together that sort of question of, “What would internet humor be like if the world was ending?” That part is a central part of the book, which is another kind of non-narrative prose. And that was actually the beginning.

Initially, I had some thought — and I was very interested in it, I think — that there were various conversations about joke thieves on Instagram and Twitter. We can think of a couple very big examples of that. I thought about doing something about that in the way that memes circulate and spread around, and kind of what belongs intellectually and to whom, and then I moved away from that idea as we started getting into the election season. I just decided there wasn’t enough oomph to it. I could see someone writing a good novel about joke thieves on the internet. But I’m not the right person. My interests are much more overtly political, so once we got into the election I decided that I would try to write a book that would be ready before the inauguration, that would be possible to be published whether either a Republican or a Democrat became the next president

Unfortunately, my agent popped me out of this idea. Because there was no way on the timeline, there was just no way to do it and do it well. I’d basically have to have two versions of the book written, and it would have to move through copyediting proofs and stuff. And in both cases, the world would come to an end. And I’m not sure … If we’d assumed that Hillary was the nominee, and she was the president, I hadn’t even figured out exactly how she would bring about the end of the world. I mean, she certainly, I didn’t figure it out. I didn’t have to figure it out.

She’s pretty hawkish.

She’s pretty hawkish, and it’s certainly possible that the world would already be in a nuclear war if she was president. But she’s also this technocratic, relatively pragmatic person, so who knows? But it ended up going this other direction, but that was where it started, this idea of people rushing around to make the best Twitter jokes they could when the world was ending, which we saw in practice when there was that transformer explosion in Queens.

I remember that explosion in Queens.

Did you have a joke about it?

Oh, yeah. You know, Twitter is so ephemeral. I’m sure I had some kind of joke, but I can’t remember what it was, even.

Yeah. I deleted Twitter after my book came out after a few months, because I was so tired of it. But I remember that being a very giddy night on Twitter. Like, everyone was coming up with these jokes about it being a nuclear attack, or it’s the aliens coming to get us, or Independence Day-type stuff.

I really feel called out by your novel, because I’ve never seen media Twitter skewered so excellently. Horrifying. 

I’m trying to remember if Vulture or New York magazine is namechecked in there.

They are and they aren’t. You namecheck them insofar as you cite my colleague Madison Malone-Kircher — @4evermalone — you cite her at one point. I picked up the book at Spoonbill and Sugarbird, in Williamsburg. I picked it up on a whim, sat down at a cafe and started reading it, and then, 24 hours later, I was done with the novel. I’m a relatively slow reader, so that was a testament to it, and about twenty minutes in, I got to the part where Madison was cited, and I took a photo, and she hadn’t even heard of the book, so I did outreach for it. New York magazine has that brief mention insofar as she gets cited, but not as much as, you know, Josh Marshall, who gets mentioned by name. Every reference point you had to us, us terrible ink-stained wretches on Twitter, was far too accurate for comfort. Do you have a particular vendetta against Media Twitter? 

Not at all, no. When I was on Twitter, I loved Media Twitter. I’m sure I followed you. It’s funny: Twitter is an interesting thing where once you’ve stepped away from it for a month, you almost forget everything about it. Was your avatar a cartoon?

Yes.

OK, so I definitely followed you. But I followed tons of people, which is always fascinating. I worked in book publishing, which is … 

Adjacent.

Yes, it’s adjacent, but it’s very different from the sort of people who worked at Gawker and New York magazine, Vulture, The Cut, Vox, etc., where I do feel like there’s a lot of very funny people, spending a lot of effort on that medium, which book people tend not to do as much, for various reasons. There’s a sort of personal branding that goes on on Twitter amongst media people, in just trying to have the funniest comments about stuff. It’s amazing. I love it. 

I feel like Twitter has done more to — at least in my own eyes, I don’t know about that of the world, though I assume so — it’s done more to delegitimize journalists as people than anything since the age of yellow journalism. You can go onto this free website and find out just how moronic and petty the people who are ostensibly interpreting reality for you are. It’s wild. You can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. It’s true for me, I’m sure.

It was such a relief for me to delete my Twitter and pass that 30-day thing, and go: Oh, good. Because the entire time I was on Twitter, I was also in book publishing. So I’m sure I never said anything too outré, but I’m sure I said some things that are a little more outré than I would want, that I would not say now.

It encourages you to blurt things out.

I remember when Gawker was closing or something, I remember Ashley Feinberg got pilloried for some tweet. And then she went through and started deleting every tweet of hers. And then she stopped halfway through, and just was like: I give up. I don’t even remember what the controversy was. The nice thing is, even with the churn in the industry, a lot of people just keep landing somewhere.

Feinberg, I love her.

Oh, she’s done amazing reporting, finding the weirdest stuff. Like Mitt Romney’s secret … 

Pierre Delecto! We wouldn’t know without her. No, I mean, one of the reasons I like working at New York magazine is, we have people, who, like Ashley, get that this is what the world is now. This is where everything happens: on people’s finstas, or wherever. You learn more about a person by how they’re interacting with technology, than you do by what their public statements are. I really appreciate people like Ashley, or my colleague Max Read, or Adrian Chen, who I haven’t seen anything from in a while. Has he been writing?

I don’t know. Didn’t he write one of the early big pieces on the Russian troll farms? 

Yes. He sort of has earned taking a little while off, because he had this five-, six-year streak where he kept churning things out that were paradigm-shifting, including the most terrifying article I’ve ever read, which was the first look at content-moderation farms. I remember reading that article and going, As a society, we’re completely fucked.

There was just a Mary South story in The New Yorker this week about a woman who works in a content-moderation farm.

I missed that one.
It’s good. My first job in media was at The Huffington Post when they launched. And you cannot imagine — or I’m sure you can imagine perfectly well — but when they started to have some big hits, they had Arianna, or — who was the guy who was the MSNBC correspondent for a long time, who was kind of center-left? Anyway, he was the one who said that the [Valerie] Plame leaker was [Karl] Rove, and that was something that happened at Huffington Post, which is something I can tell you off mic. But I just remember with that, and Cindy Sheehan was someone that Arianna got to blog for them. So there were things that were appearing on — and it’s so funny to think of this now — like, the Yahoo homepage, that were repurposed from our site, and we’d get these thousands of comments all of a sudden, and there’d be no system in place — or a very ineffectual system — for figuring out how to deal with them. And there were just, like, teams of volunteers Arianna would cajole somehow, just sitting at home, moderating hundreds and hundreds or thousands of comments.

I remember one time, this person wrote a controversial — and it turned out to be not correct — piece about Katrina and how people were resorting to cannibalism, which got jumped on by Drudge and the right, so thousands of comments. And then Arianna made him moderate his own comments, and then he made his wife do it. [Laughs.] So I’m on the phone with this nice lady, who doesn’t really know how to use any of this technology, and I’m just explaining how the comment-moderation system works, but eventually there’s a number of systems that come into play that are a little more effective. But it really was the Wild West there for a while, in terms of comments, and in terms of trying to figure out a better moderation system, but the trolls would be constantly thinking of ways to outsmart you. They’d realize: OK, only the first 50 characters or whatever are visible in your views, so they’d start out with, you know, “Applause, applause, Arianna! You’ve really hit the nail on the head with this!” And then they’d start out with this disgusting homophobic or antisemitic stuff. Or they’d figure out if they’d made their username an offensive comment, the moderators weren’t necessarily looking at the username, they were looking at the content, and so there’d be people who’d be like — a lighter, funnier one was “Blowbianna Huffingfumes” — I remember would try to comment. But again, that was an earlier glimpse at the kind of antisemitic stuff in the sewers of the Internet. Because so much of it, I’d say over 50% of the comments, that were, you know, hate speech comments, were antisemitic. 

It’s funny, you saying that makes me remember this thing that’s kind of on the flipside of that set of debates, which is that in 2009, or 2010, I went to this event run by CAMERA, which stands for Coalition for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. Very much one of those backronyms — I’m sure they started with the acronym and worked backwards. It’s a little cumbersome.

[Laughs.] I don’t think I knew the word “backronym.” It’s great!

I didn’t come up with that. Basically, they are this bullying group that is run by very pro-Israel people, and their whole goal is that any time there’s a story about Israel they don’t like, they’ll create targeted campaigns against media organizations, to say, “You’re biased, and we’re going to boycott you, blah blah blah.” I went there because my grandmother is a donor — long story, this is the problem of our generational issues in the Jewish community right now — but she invited me to go, because she couldn’t go that year, and she was like, “I have a ticket, I can’t go.” I thought, You only live once, and Elie Weisel was the keynote speaker, and I was like, That might be interesting, see him before he dies, let’s do it. So I went to it, and the highlight of the whole evening was, this nice little old lady won the award for “letter-writer of the year.”

Oh my god.

What that meant was, she had coordinated this harassment campaign against the BBC, I believe, for a story they ran. And in her acceptance speech — she must have been 65 if she was a day — she goes, “I just want to tell everyone: did you know that at the bottom of most news stories online, you can leave a comment? And the best part is, you can write a comment about whatever you want! So when I read a news story, I like to make sure I go to the bottom of the story, and no matter what it’s about, I write, ‘I stand by the state of Israel during these dark times!’” And I was like, This is how it happens! These people have a completely different conception of what the internet is than I do. Theirs is probably more valid than mine!

Trump wins the Internet by being that old person who barely knows … He doesn’t use the technology the way other people use it, but old people love it, and it immediately gets reported on all the outlets that old people do watch. Fox News — and all of them! — are just Twitter machines for Trump. I don’t know what the answer is, or if there is an answer. I never think that not covering something is a good idea, but it’s hard to know. 

With the book, was there a degree to which you felt a little better about having gotten all this off your chest, when you were done with it?

I was in a pretty intense mental anguish after the election, like a lot of people were. So I wrote the Zeppelin scene that opens the book in, I don’t know, like a month. I had to turn it in for … I had a deadline for getting something into the magazine Granta, so I spent all my time in that world, writing that stuff, and it was a great way to channel that. Whereas now I find everything so diffuse that it’s … I’ve been trying to write a couple more stories about the Trump era, and I just finished one which is going to be published by n+1 in a few months, but it’s about a gay, white-supremacist, incel, would-be mass shooter, and then you imagine some of the consequences of what his attempted acts looks like. I think it’s in part because of just being mentally worn down by these years of Trump, it’s harder to write in that sort of white heat, and it took me a year to write this one story, and the other one I’m working on, that’s very situated in the Trump era, so I wish I could capture some of that early rage. 

I know, it’s so funny when you talk about that, because I do think back on early 2017 the other day, and how I felt so, on some perverse level, excited, because it felt like … I remember tweeting one day “Moral clarity is a hell of a drug,” because I’d come out of this eight year period of being uncomfortable with the Obama presidency, but feeling weird saying that, because there was still this sort of residual “he’s one of ours” thing. And even though I know all this awful stuff about the Obama presidency, it still felt like not everyone I knew was on the same page about that. 

If you say it on Twitter … I mean, you can say it on your newsletter.

Right. Now, I feel like you can get away with that with Obama a little more. But circa 2017, it felt like a new thing to be able to be like, I know the president of the United States is a bad person and does bad things for the country, and everyone around me agrees with me. Like, I’ve never been more certain of something. I was at the protest at JFK against the Muslim ban. I didn’t have anything going on that day, my aunt was a big activist and was in town, and I like looked at Twitter and saw that this thing was happening, and we were like, “I guess, let’s go.” We were some of the first people there. I remember being there and feeling this thrill, like, Wow, the whole world is watching, this is the beginning of something. And it’s so hard to feel that now. 

Yeah, I mean, this is going to be the ballot box. It’s astonishing, the man’s diet and stress levels, but, yeah, he’ll outlive us all.

That’s what’s crazy! The guy’s going to die in his fourth term, you know? 

My story to complement yours, is: I did not go to JFK, but I did cancel my Uber [because they were breaking the temporary taxi-cab strike of that day]. I deleted Uber and sent a very sort of aggressive message to them. And then I found myself traveling in a country that did not have Lyft, and really, by far the best and safest way to get around was Uber, and I could not get it reloaded, and this kept coming up, and I was always travelling with my boyfriend and used his account. But I was always travelling in a place, and I was like,  This is crazy. And it took about five emails with Uber customer service to finally get myself reinstated, to this account that I so indignantly, self-righteously canceled. I’m sure I would be very embarrassed if I saw that email. And you put it next to my grovelling emails where I’m like … Well, I didn’t grovel, but it’s me asking to get my account set back up.

When I read the book, I felt like, Oh, I can unclench reading this, because this is the only book that gets how fucked-up and freaked-out I am. I felt very seen, both as someone who uses Media Twitter, but also someone who thinks about these worst-case scenarios, because you’re not supposed to say those out loud, you know? I always feel like I’m going to be bringing someone down, if I say, “Hey, have you ever thought about the fact that even if Trump loses the election, he’s not going to concede, and it’ll create a constitutional crisis that the United States can’t withstand, or we just go into open authoritarianism?” I’ll occasionally say stuff like that, and nobody has a response, and it’s like, OK, well, what’s the next topic? Because what are you supposed to say? 

I mean, I am just wired to be a catastrophic thinker. It’s always, The dog is going to run into the street and get hit by a car. The garbage disposal is going to take your finger off. Or, in a nice combo of that, I’m going to drop the kitchen knife onto the dog, and kill it. 

I think about that all the time with my cats. I always think, if I’m carrying a knife, I’m going to drop it and kill my cat. 

My dog is always stepping underfoot in the kitchen. I’m thinking that if I hold a cast-iron pan, that’s almost weighs as much as the dog does, or I’m holding a knife that’s sharp, some part of my mind is like, Be very, very careful. That type of thinking somehow makes it more likely, in a perverse way, that you’ll accidentally be so careful with the knife that you’ll slip on the big grease stain that’s on the floor, then the knife will impale you into your dog and you’ll both die.

The Rube Goldberg device that is fate.

Exactly. I haven’t seen this whole series, but I saw Final Destination last summer, and it has the Rube Goldberg, weird/crazy ways of killing each other. While the movies themselves are not, at least based on the first one and a half, are not, you know, the most extraordinary pieces of filmmaking of all time, those kills really get my synapses firing, and I haven’t even begun to think of all the horrible ways to die that surround us at all times.

On maybe not as abjectly grim a note, I didn’t have a copy of your book to review before we started talking, because I gave my copy to my radical Filipina weed dealer. She came over one time to deliver, and she had some pins in Tagalog, and they had these rad designs on them, and she said they were from Filipino punk bands, and I went, “I have a book for you!” So, why did you have the Philippines play such a large role in the book? That was such an interesting and specific choice. 

Well, there are a few reasons for that. One, a global apocalypse is by nature a global event, and I didn’t want to be one of those books that’s a couple of white people in the US. But, I mean, the Philippines is interesting. Manila was the site of … The first round-the-world telegraph runs there. There’s a lot of interesting Internet history, and a lot more that people have told me about since the book came out. Apparently, a lot of new changes to Facebook or other sites get beta-tested in the Philippines.

Well, Facebook had this kind of closed ecosystem of millions of people there, where Facebook distributed, in a deal with the government, all of these phones that use Facebook and that’s kind of all they can do. It was the most evil-genius plot, because you had all these people who literally never had access to the Internet before, and, all of a sudden, the entirety of their Internet experience is Facebook. They think Facebook is the Internet. 

I should have included that in the book.

You had plenty, don’t worry. The point is, it’s a population that Facebook feels like they can experiment on. 

That’s right. And also, it was one of the countries that was the subject of American colonial power. It’s an English-speaking country — not entirely, there’s a vast number of languages in the Philippines — but it’s a country where many people speak English. And also, my partner, Paul Nadal, was doing his dissertation at Berkeley on the relationship between literature and economic changes from essentially the independence through the present day, so there’s a lot of really interesting sort of big-systems-y thinking in this dissertation that I found generative for my own writing. And he being from the Philippines, that made it. We share a lot of work with each other, so he was sort of able to help me think through how the character Sebastian would appear, what his childhood would be like, what kind of worked and what didn’t. I want a Filipino reader to be able to read this and be able to say, OK, that seems pretty good. Just as I’d like a network-security expert to read this and be like, OK, I’ve seen much worse. I wanted to pass a basic smell test on that front. So the almost-collaborative element with my partner was very useful for those sections. 

In terms of the main protagonist, were you thinking, I want to make sure that my protagonist here is not just a white man? 

I think the decision to make Rachel, to some extent, had to do with the influence of Didion on the book. Didion has three political novels: Democracy, A Book of Common Prayer, and The Last Thing He Wanted. Not everyone loves those political novels, but I adore them. I think the voice in the Rachel portions is kind of inflected with that kind of cold, detached tone that Didion brings to the narrators and female characters in her work. So there seemed to be something … I just never considered having that character not be a woman. 

Ideating on stuff like that, it sounds like your head was in the right place, because I’ve found that as a cis white man or whatever, the more I think about writing fiction, the more I feel like I really do have this fixation on people who are like me. And it’s really hard. Part of that is: I’m afraid if I try to step outside of that, I’m going to get it wrong. I want to have a good healthy bit of representation, but it’s hard to think, Ugh, I’m going to try to write a character who isn’t like me, and everyone’s going to laugh at me because I do a bad job with it.

I mean, that can definitely happen. But on the other hand, I teach writing, and I edit books, and so on, and I do think that writing outside of your own race, nationality, gender identity, sexuality, etc. can be … I think it’s more high-wire. If you fail, the failure is worse, it’s a harder fall than if you’re like, “And here’s a Jewish guy in media in New York City.” But I think a lot of great writing comes out of that, and out of both people writing very … There are people like Ben Lerner, who writes very close to himself, yet still uses that character, even if it’s a very selfish character, very similar to the real-world Ben Lerner. He’s still able to dilate the perspective in very interesting ways, and he can bring in very interesting points of views and perspectives. And other people write very far-ranging things with lots of different voices. Marlon James, for instance, The History of Seven Killings, he writes an incredible multiplicity of voices in that book.

When I was a kid, I always used to tell myself, after having watched a documentary about the making of Alien, “If I ever write fiction, I’ll do what they did for Alien,” which is that they wrote Ripley as a man, and then just said, “What if we made her a woman, and didn’t change anything about the script?” Like, “Yeah, that would be the real feminist thing to do! I’ll write a character as a man and just change all the pronouns, and that’ll show that women are just like men!” And the older I get, I realize that they really lucked out on that one, because that’s a recipe for disaster, to just act like the specific experiences that we give a population are going to be the same universally.

Is it Alien or Aliens that ends with her snuggled with her cat in her sleeping chamber? 

It’s Alien. 

So it does end on a very maternal note, so they did kind of finesse things a bit. There’s no way Arnold Schwarzenneger is going to end a movie in his nighty, clutching a cat. 

I don’t know. I can see it. But by the time they did Aliens, which I think is a superior movie, they really leaned into the fact that she’s a woman.

With the kid stuff.

With the kid stuff, with the climaxes. It was the origin of the Bechdel Test, Aliens. That was the comic that Alison Bechdel got cited for, which was about two lesbians walking by a theater that’s playing Aliens, and one of them says, “I judge movies on whether …” all those criteria. And in that movie, you have scenes where Ripley and Newt are talking about the aliens, and not men, and so it technically passes the Bechdel Test. Now we’re going down a tangent. 

What are they called, Xenomorphs? 

Yes!

They’re female, right?

The queens are female. Other than that, they’re kind of genderless.

But then you get to have that amazing line: “Get away from her, you bitch!”

I love those movies. Sigourney Weaver was my first crush. Well, it was a tie between her and Harrison Ford, simultaneously. 

She is super-hot. I wish she was in more stuff. But I guess her being relatively selective is … I guess she’s going to be in all five Avatars, or whatever.

Talk about something dystopian. The fact that the Avatar series is still going to have as many installments … I joked, when they announced that there were going to be four more of them, that, ironically, we weren’t going to get to the end of them, because the global ecosystem will collapse, in the most bitter irony you can imagine. But I don’t know when these things are going to fucking come out.

What’s going to be funny, too, is when they’re going to be huge hits, and everybody who has been shitting on them all these years has to eat crow. 

When Film Twitter has to eat crow, like they had to do with Mission: Impossible. For some reason, it was decided that the Mission: Impossible series is really good.

And the Fast and Furious series, too. 

Yeah, that kind of groupthink on Twitter is something that really drives me up a tree, because I’m so susceptible to it. I think back sometimes on things I’ve been enthusiastic about — whether they’re cultural objects, political moments, whatever — and so often the enthusiasm was, Well, everyone on Twitter was excited about it, too, and I got caught up in the excitement. I guess that happens outside of Twitter, too. But for me, I hadn’t experienced it that much, prior to being in the scrum of social media like that, where I can really just love a work only because everybody else loves it and we’re all collaborating on loving it at once. Do you miss anything about being on Twitter? 

No. I honestly, like, in terms of muscle memory stuff, I find myself still, once every three weeks, typing Gawker in, to go to Gawker, but I don’t do that with Twitter. I loved it, but it was consuming, I never felt like I had a good enough ratio, and in all the ways that social media can drive you insane, it drove me insane. I was like, Wait a minute, that Tweet isn’t getting any business? That’s a really good Tweet! 

When did you join? 

I joined not super-late, pretty early. But, I think in retrospect, if I had it to do over again, I followed a ton of people, political writers and media people, so I had a very underwater follower ratio until my first book came out. I think if I had a good ratio, having joined whenever I did … When did Twitter start?

2006.

I think I started in 2009 or 2010, maybe. I feel like I would have had a very different Twitter experience, because I realize, once you get into a positive ratio, then I’m looking at people who follow me when something comes out, I do sort of like that thing of holding the cursor over and seeing what people’s ratios are. And it’s so toxic and stupid, but then on the other hand it’s not like you have time to do a deep dive into every single person that follows you’s Twitter feed, to find out if they’re one of the good ones, so it becomes a sort of sorting mechanism. The fact that I’m constructing this theory for why I was not more popular on Twitter, like, nine months after I deleted my account, just shows how deep the claws can get into your cerebral cortex. 

It’s one of those things that happens in the tech spheres nowadays, where you go: Oh, the FDA isn’t approving these things, right? There should be some long-term testing on the effects of Twitter on the human brain, but that would never happen. We test pills that go out into the world, but not these things that affect brain chemistry in a very similar way. 

Absolutely. There’s no question that my concentration — and some of that has to do with the Trump era too, and before the Trump era, too — it’s way down from what it used to be. I think about the amount of focus I used to bring to book editing, when I was first starting out, and now it’s really, I have to play all these games with myself to keep my attention focused. I almost have to gamify editing, where I go: I can go through these twenty pages, then I get a reward of getting to check Instagram or whatever. It was so refreshing to switch to Instagram, and I’m more new to Instagram, but that world can be … It’s nicer than Twitter, but it still has the same basic levers and claws in your brain.

Unfortunately, as a journalist, I have to use all these platforms to promote and network, basically just do outreach. There are people you want to get an interview with, who you can’t reach any other way, and you tweet at them. It’s true about Facebook and Instagram as well. You have to be hustling like this, and we get this amnesia to the degree where I don’t remember what I regarded as a successful article prior to social media. I can’t remember how I knew if articles did well. The other day, someone was asking me about writing for my college paper, and I said something like, “Oh, my most popular article was X.” And they said, “How did you know it was popular? What was the traffic on it?” And I went, like, “We barely had a website, I don’t know. I guess people told me they liked it? I don’t remember.” I had some feeling like, This article has done well. People have read it. I can move on with my life. And now, you just have numbers in front of you. They’re made up numbers, or very misleading numbers.

Imagine if you were a creator on Netflix or something, and you never found out. I know how many of my books, roughly, went out into the world, or I would if I looked at my royalty statements. I think there’s been a glitch on them mailing them to me. I’m like, Good. I’m just going to keep that. Until they’re sending checks with the royalty statements, I don’t want to know. This is a little bit of a sidepoint, but it’s also funny, because what you’re famous for is not necessarily the thing that you love. I was talking to the poet Meghan O’Rourke, who also wrote for Slate, and she edits more now. I think she edits a literary magazine now. She wrote a piece on Crocs for Slate. 

Like the shoes.

When they first became a big thing. So, you know, a poet sells the number of copies of a book that a poet sells. Probably low four figures would be very, very good. And her Crocs piece has been viewed millions and millions of times, and it will always be the most-read thing. But it’s very strange, what you put out into the world. Like, and I’m sure your publisher would want you to write a piece for Lithub, a personal piece for the TimesMagazine, or something, get interviewed, try to get all these things, and the effect is so hard to … It’s so hard to know what makes things line up and hit, and what doesn’t, and book publishing is certainly as strange as it can be when it comes to that. There are things that are big that aren’t supposed to be big, and things that are the reverse. And some people do a perfect, they do every bit of publicity, they get a ton of attention, and the book still … y’know?

I’m very curious to see what happens with my book, because the hustling ecosystem is so weird, and changes every day. Everyone thinks they have the right formula figured out, but there hasn’t been a stable formula for rolling out a piece, whether it’s an article or a book or whatever, in like a decade.

People drop pieces on the weekend now, sometimes. There’s not even Friday afternoon to Monday morning, as blocked out. It’s just whenever. 

Is it easier or harder to get through the day, post-being done with the novel? Do you feel like you’ve made peace with some part of yourself, and maybe it’s easier to face the day?

No, I don’t feel that way. 

I’m sorry to hear that.

Although, I do feel like these years are sort of beating us into slightly new, worse shape. So maybe it’s a little less immediately painful, so the permanent deformation of my brain and myself is something that will last a long time that is permanent, I guess. 

What are you working on?
A story collection. A lot of politics and political violence and so on. 

I gotta read your first book. If this is something I were getting paid for, I would have read it already. But it sounds like a great novel.

Thank you, yeah. It’s longer and in some ways a little less accessible than the new one.

Good, I like inaccessible.

Lots of antisemitism in it.

Sign me up!

This may surprise you, but Osama bin Laden, if you look into his public statements, he doesn’t have the greatest things to say about the Jews. 

No, he doesn’t. That’s a whole other conversation, about, the American Jewish establishment, because of the degree to which it shares a fear of the Muslim population, has bought into Trumpism, that’s one of those internal Jewish conversations that we try not to air dirty laundry too much about.

But will the percentages electorally really switch?

No, you just end up with this weird perspective shift where you go: Who speaks for the Jews? Is it the majority opinion, or is it the most committed people who care a lot about being Jewish? Because among people who self-identify as Jews, in the broadest sense, 70 to 80% of American Jews voted against Trump in 2016. Roughly similarly numbers voted against Republicans in the midterms. And while that’s an overwhelming majority, the overwhelming majority of American Jews are not really involved in Jewish life anymore. It’s not that much of a focus for them. Once you get into Jewish identitarian circles, like institutions that are explicitly built around being Jewish, all of a sudden, they lean way Trump. It’s a small population, but these are the people who sort of act as the spokespeople. So you end up with this weird bifurcation where the average American Jew is going to be much closer to an Eli Valley than a Jared Kushner, but at the same time, Jared Kushner is the one who is in power. Those are the Jews who are holding the levers of power. Now I sound like an antisemite, but that’s what always happens when you talk about your own population. 

Not at all. The legislation against BDS campaigns, it’s crazy. It feels like the anti-Sarah Schulman and Judith Butler laws of 2019 or something.

Are you Jewish?

No.

When Trump said that he thought American Jews were being disloyal, and didn’t specify, initially what they were disloyal to. Now, everybody and their grandmother could tell you: He’s talking about Israel. He’s saying that American Jews are being disloyal to Israel, which is a very antisemitic thing to say, because we shouldn’t have expectations to loyalty to another country, but the Republican Jewish Coalition, god bless them, tweeted out something to the effect of, “We stand with President Trump. It’s truly terrible when you’re disloyal to yourself.” And I was like: How do you jump your brain through enough hoops that you feel like, Yeah, people will buy this!

I could be wrong, but hasn’t he used the term, like “your country?” “Got your capital back.”

Repeatedly! He refers to Benjamin Netanyahu, in front of Jewish audiences, as “your Prime Minister.” And at the same time, I was just in Israel, and I was talking to so many Israeli Jews who couldn’t get why I wasn’t on board for Trump, because he’s “good for Israel.” And I was like: I don’t know what to say to you. And some of them were my age! That was the scary thing. It wasn’t just an “OK, boomer” thing. That’s where we’re at, and it’s so much of Trump politics, even beyond the Jewish community: It’s generally disorienting from an epistemological perspective, to think that so many people live in this alternate reality. I couldn’t have a conversation with these people. And that makes me sad. It makes me mad, and then it makes me very very sad, ‘cause I don’t know how you put that toothpaste back in the tube. How much did you have to learn about the way the internet is structured for the book?

Oh, a lot. Tons. I had to read a bunch of books, and also, my brother Chris and a friend and former colleague of his — both mentioned in the acknowledgments — spent hours talking through the scenarios and helped me come up with the central act that takes place, which involves the addressing functions of the internet, which is kind of hard to get your mind around, because we think of: You type in Weather.com and you go to Weather.com. But, of course, that’s not what happens. We type in Weather.com because humans are good at remembering words. Computers are very efficient with numbers. So there’s an IP address, which of course a human — unless it’s all zeroes and a one — would not be able to remember. 

It’s not far off from an AOL keyword, we just act like it’s more advanced because it involves www or whatever. 

The thing is, the addressing function, where a URL address matches up to an IP address, is a tremendously complicated endeavor, involving massive servers around the globe that have to update repeatedly. It used to be that the entirety of the internet could be spread on one spreadsheet, on one computer, and you could ask that spreadsheet what the IP is for a URL. As you hit a world in which there are X billion of IP addresses, making sure these address books still work. It’s just a consuming problem, and it always will be for the internet. There’s a new version of IP addressing that we’re currently in the transition of, which opens up, I don’t have the exact figures in front of me, but when they first created the IP addresses, they assumed that the number of figures in the IP addresses would be essentially infinite, because the current addressing function allows for 10 billion addresses, or 100 billion addresses, or whatever. 

That might as well have been infinity to them. 

But that is not the case. And we’re running into something called IP exhaustion, which is something where initial IPs are running out, for a lot of reasons, and becoming scarce and valuable. So they’ve created a new version of the IP protocol that has many, many, many more times the IP addresses in it. And it’s seemingly infinite. And I think that this time, maybe it is, because there’s an awful lot. But it’s a big number.

You really sort of hit on the two things that frighten me the most — well, not climate change, so two of the three: the collapse of the internet, and Donald Trump. That’s how I knew that this would be the book for me, because those are two of the things I think about most often. Did you read David Wallace-Wells’ book? I always tell people, “You should read this book, but only if you’re ready,” because it’s very much a Matrix — I know the MRA’s have taken this word — but it’s very much a redpill moment, where, once you read that book, nothing looks the same. It’s a slim volume, and when you’re done, you go, Oh, this is the most important thing. I’m sure people have had this with other books too, but for me, it was that. And I’m curious: Do you feel like we’re at a bigger risk of nuclear war or climate change disaster? What do you think?

The climate change disaster is happening and is ongoing. I don’t know. 

I only ask, because this feels like the rare conversation I can have with somebody who thinks about this stuff on the regular. 

Once I get this short-story collection put to bed, the next novel I’m working on will be about climate change and the end of society as we know it, and then hopefully I’ll be done writing about the end of the world. I’ve sort of had in mind for years this trilogy, and it’s not a real trilogy, but a very loose conceptual trilogy, where the first book is kind of about the singularity, the second book is kind of about nuclear apocalypse, and the third is kind of about climate change. World-ending events. And hopefully after that I can do some self-examination and just write a realist novel.

A roman à clef, finally. 

Maybe.