essays against everything

Against Everything: Essays

The essays in  Against Everything  are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada)   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

About the Author

Mark Greif’s scholarly work looks at the connections of literature to intellectual and cultural history, the popular arts, aesthetics and everyday ethics. He taught at the New School and Brown before coming to Stanford. He is the author of The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (Princeton, 2015), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, and the Susanne M. Glasscock Prize for interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. His book Against Everything: Essays (Pantheon, 2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in Criticism. His current book concerns the history and aesthetics of pornography from the eighteenth century to the internet age. In 2003, Greif was a founder of the journal n+1, and has been a principal member of the organization since. His books as co-editor and co-author have included The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street (n+1/FSG, 2012), Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (Verso, 2011), and What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation (n+1/HarperCollins, 2010). His books and articles have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. He has been a Marshall Scholar, and has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. Greif has written for publications including the London Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde, and his essays have been selected for Best American Essays and the Norton Anthology. He remains interested in the relationships between high scholarship, literary and arts journalism, low culture, and small magazines.

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By Daphne Merkin

• Aug. 26, 2016

AGAINST EVERYTHING Essays By Mark Greif 304 pp. Pantheon Books. $28.95.

We live in singularly unsubtle times, when presidential candidates shout invective instead of delivering talking points and Twitter posts privilege catchiness over nuance. Then again, ours has never been a culture to value the reflective life — unlike in France, say, where public intellectuals hold political positions, or England, where Oxbridge dons form an aristocracy of the mind. Except for a brief period during the last century, from the 1930s through the 1960s or so, when an active intelligentsia (even the word sounds dated) loosely known as the New York Intellectuals formed around a clutch of publications including Partisan Review, The Nation and Commentary, and critics like Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy had a say on matters literary and political, we tend to give short shrift to intellection for its own sake, regarding it as something best corralled off in the academy.

And indeed, for the last 20 years, instead of thinkers, we have seen the rise of pundits, those ubiquitous opiners on the news of the day who take the short view of necessity. This trend has been bucked by a handful of serious-minded magazines with a spectacularly small readership and by the occasional erudite voice in newspapers like this one. Sensing a gap in the discourse, a group of young, mostly ­Harvard-educated writers started a publication called n+1 in 2004, which attempted to fill the void where Partisan Review and the like had once engaged in “the life of significant contention,” as Diana Trilling put it. Which brings us, happily, to the occasion of “Against Everything,” a new collection of essays by Mark Greif, an editor at n+1 (where most of these pieces first appeared) and a frequent contributor since its inception on widely disparate themes.

“Against Everything” is a portrait of the egghead as a youngish man (Greif was born in 1975), trying the culture on for size, deeming it too saggy in some places and too constricting in others. Greif, who has a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale and is an associate professor at the New School, seems to have read everybody on everything: His writing is studded with references from Diogenes and William James to Stanley Cavell and Baudrillard to Anatole Broyard and Foreign Affairs. Unlike his earlier book, “The Age of the Crisis of Man,” which set out to trace American humanism and was unavailingly (sometimes ponderously) academic, this collection decodes subjects both Hi and Lo, from the meaning of life and the philosophy of contemporary warfare to the implications of rap and reality television. In a short preface, Greif (who grew up near Walden Pond) credits Thoreau with inspiring his approach to experience: “I taught myself to overturn, undo, deflate, rearrange, unthink and rethink.” His method of inquiry combines a kind of scholarly purism — what would our approach to x (nutrition, sex, exercise, punk rock, the police) be like if it didn’t come wadded with expectations and a codified system of mores? — and an endearing modesty. His sensibility wavers between the hopeful and the elegiac. “To wish to be against everything,” he observes, “is to want the world to be bigger than all of it, disposed to dissolve rules and compromises in a gallon or a drop, while an ocean of possibility rolls around us.”

“Against Exercise,” the book’s opening salvo, shows Greif at his contrarian, learned best, invoking the ancient Greeks and Hannah Arendt while questioning the distinction between private and public ­spaces. “Our gym . . . is the atomized space in which one does formerly private things, before others’ eyes, with the lonely solitude of a body acting as if it were still in private,” he writes. As will prove his wont, Greif tends to employ economic terms — “the desperate materialist gratifications of a hedonic society,” “fund of capital” — to make humanistic points. There is more than a whiff of the student Marxist in him, but instead of narrowing his view, this slightly censorious impulse lets him see things most of us prefer to overlook, including the anorexic delusion behind the pursuit of fitness: “The doctrine of thinness introduces a radical fantasy of exercise down to the bone. It admits the dream of a body unencumbered by any excess of corporeality.”

Throughout the book’s first section, Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand, scrutinizing it for false messages, bad faith and the occasional sign of progress. “Afternoon of the Sex Children” draws a chilling picture of a culture in which youthfulness is fetishized and the pedophilic impulse of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert has become normalized. Greif traces the evolution of what he calls “the sex child” to “a merging of old prurient fantasies, dating from the Victorians and the Progressives, with the actual sexual liberation of children after midcentury.” He perceptively notes that our equation of sexual desire with juvenescence sets up a form of competition whereby the mandate to remain young is played upon by all the forces of the marketplace — “the professional commentators and product vendors and the needy audiences and ordinary people.” Similarly, our narcissistic view of sex as a “focus on self-discovery” rather than an avenue to “overwhelming romantic love” turns it into a mirror instead of a window: “Self-discovery puts a reflecting wall between the self and attention to the other, so that all energy supposedly exerted in fascination, attraction and love just bounces back, even when it appears to go out as love for the other.”

There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core, even if his prose frequently bristles with abstractions. So his essay “On Food,” although it is filled with clattering facts about “agricultural mechanization” and “technicized food” and threatens to go off on a full-scale critique of capitalism as well as a smaller quarrel with the writer Michael Pollan, contains pertinent ideas about “foodieism” (“a natural hobby for first-world professionals,” Greif says, “ostensibly taking up the world, but referring back to domination and the perfection of the enriched, physical self”) as well as what he terms the “progressive food philosophy” that enjoins us to believe that “unexamined food is not worth eating.”

But perhaps the most surprising essay in this section — in that it’s not what one would expect from someone with the guilt-ridden liberal credentials Greif seems to have — is his piece on Nadya Suleman, the infamous Octomom. Rather than blame Suleman unilaterally for her decision to have six embryos implanted in her womb (two of which she claimed split, adding pairs of twins), in addition to the six children she already had, three of whom were disabled, he proposes that she was simply living out another tale of 21st-­century excess: “She played a version of the drama of our time in the marionette theater of her womb.” He isn’t suggesting she is admirable — “She clearly belongs to the tradition of the great American wrecks,” he notes — but he is suggesting that the media’s anger toward her was displaced from the financial meltdown around the same time, that it was easier to demonize Suleman than to take on the failing banks and fat-cat financiers who created the housing crisis: “Octo­mom was the fat spider at the center of a hanging web. Squash her!”

There are a host of other essays, including one on the allure of Radiohead that didn’t quite grab me, although even here Greif has intriguing insights about the way pop music fuels defiance (as distinct from revolution). Four loosely linked ­pieces on “The Meaning of Life,” with titles like “Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution” and “Anaesthetic Ideology,” attempt nothing less than to define the nature of reality as mediated by a “market culture.” These have a tendency to pile dense idea on dense idea in a way that can be taxing to read — but the final one, “Thoreau Trailer Park,” connects Greif’s formative beliefs with the Occupy movement in a manner that is touchingly personal and ultimately hopeful.

In our dumbed-down, social-media-­driven age, “Against Everything” embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere.

Daphne Merkin’s books include the essay collection “The Fame Lunches” and “This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression,” which will be published in February.

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Against Everything: Essays Paperback – August 8, 2017

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• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date August 8, 2017
• Dimensions 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 1101971746
• ISBN-13 978-1101971741
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (August 8, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101971746
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101971741
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• #68 in Modern Literary Criticism
• #603 in Essays (Books)
• #2,185 in Short Stories Anthologies

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Against Everything by Mark Greif review – hipsters and how to live

W hen he was a child, Mark Greif’s mother used to take him to swim at Walden Pond, near his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden is closely associated with Henry David Thoreau , the transcendentalist writer who lived there in a shack for two years, writing a classic work about his experience. Although neither Greif nor his mother had yet read Thoreau, they were aware of some phrases of his, having seen quotations on mugs, bumper stickers and T-shirts. On the way to and from the pond by car, Greif’s mother wondered aloud what Thoreau would have made of the roadside banalities of contemporary existence: the advertising hoardings, the shopping malls, the vast mansions. “It was my task to do the wondering,” he recalls.

This early acquaintance with Thoreau led Greif to believe philosophy to be “against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness”. And, in Against Everything , he’s fittingly uncompromising. Greif’s collection of essays is full of surprises, not least that it is, at least in part, concerned with that old fashioned question of how to live. “It’s a book of critique of things I do,” he writes in the preface. But instead of being the kind of self-help book that tells you “how to do the things you are supposed to do, but better,” it “asks about those things you are supposed to do”.

But this doesn’t capture everything Greif is up to in this politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny book. Over the course of the essays – which were first published in n+1 , the journal he co-founded in 2004 – he covers the significance of exercise, our relationship with food, the meaning of hip-hop music, Radiohead, the figure of the hipster, society’s sexualisation of children, and war. Although he’s vexed, even depressed, by many aspects of contemporary culture he analyses, he stops short of pessimism, and the essays rarely conclude without opening at least some minute window of possibility. Greif doesn’t tell you everything is great – far from it – but rather than merely sketch the bars of the prison he seems deeply concerned with how it can be escaped.

He begins in the gym, a location that, to Greif, “resembles a voluntary hospital”, where we willingly undergo self-administered treatment with the aim of improving our health. It’s also a place where formerly private activities are now carried out in public – there’s a degree of performance involved in attending. The gym is, in Greif’s estimation, a quintessentially post-industrial location where we re-enact the repetitive motions once required of us by industrial labour. “Nothing can make you believe we harbour nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym,” he writes – its pulleys, cables and bars appear to him miniature versions of factory machinery. In the process of exercising we become more aware of our own bodies as mechanisms to be fine-tuned: exercise, he writes, “makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself”.

It is also an effort to confer superiority – of longevity and of sex appeal – and he returns to this quest for youth and attractiveness in the queasily but fittingly titled essay “Afternoon of the Sex Children”. Society’s obsession with sex and youth is problematically embodied in what he calls the “sex child”, a mythical image of youth and sexual freedom born from the “lure of permanent childhood” that pervades the culture of adults. Childhood, glimpsed in the rear-view mirror of adult nostalgia, appears a utopian zone of complete freedom, and the desire for a permanent childhood is in some measure a result of the “overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t achieved one’s true youth”.

The problem, he writes, is that sex and youth are zones of competition easily marketed to people – all you have to do is to tell them that they’re having the wrong kind of sex and that they’re not as young as they used to be to stir up a sense of opportunities lost. Greif suggests that, instead, we should value “age and accomplishment, not emptiness and newness”.

The unflinching intelligence of his writing can be exhilarating, but intimidating. Yet there are many moments of levity: a doctor is described as “a mechanic who wears the white robe of an angel and is as arrogant as a boss”. Of the hipster movement he writes: “It did not yield a great literature, but made good use of fonts”.

As the book progresses, the style becomes looser and more expansive. The cool, stern tone of the earlier essays gives way to a more playful approach, typified by the essay “Learning to Rap”, in which, yes, Greif decides to teach himself how to rap along to hip-hop records. His rationale is that, as a music fan in the early 90s, he chose to devote himself to American post-punk, such as Sonic Youth and Fugazi, rather than hip-hop. This was a mistake, he now thinks, as hip-hop was the birth of a “new world-historical form” while rock “had been basically exhausted by 1972”.

It’s quite the essay. By wrestling with the specifics of learning to rap, Grief plays on the white liberal’s guilt at cultural appropriation while demonstrating the complexity, difficulty and brilliance of the form. He discusses the practical challenges: trying to decipher the lyrics of Nas, Snoop Dogg and the Notorious BIG; rapping along in a low voice with the music on his headphones as he waits for the next subway. He wrestles with what to do when a song includes the word “nigga”. Sometimes, if he’s rapping in public, he substitutes “brother”, he says, often covering his mouth with his hand. He’s awake to the humour of the setup. “This is embarrassing and shameful, but so is a white person, nearing middle age, rapping.”

Greif’s essay “What was the hipster?” is a withering critique of “tight-knit colonies of similar-looking, slouching people”. Hipsterism isn’t anti-authoritarian but rather “opens up a poisonous conduit” between rebel subculture and the dominant class. He gives a potted history of the contemporary hipster while noting its mutations, including the “hipster primitive”, a fusion of pastoral innocence with the dominant ironic mode of hipsterism. “It was not unheard of to find band members wearing masks or plush animal suits,” he notes.

Greif revisits Walden Pond in the final essay. By this point he has discussed his observations of police brutality (“a surprise of being around police is how much they touch you”) and his involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement. He compares Liberty Square, the name OWS gave their temporary home of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, “a tiny rectangle of unlovable paving”, to Walden, “a puddle in the grander scheme of things”. Each for a short while was a site of individual and collective possibility, and Greif’s incisive book is testament to their enduring influence.

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Against Everything: Essays Hardcover – 6 Sept. 2016

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• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pantheon
• Publication date 6 Sept. 2016
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• ISBN-10 9781101871157
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1101871156
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (6 Sept. 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781101871157
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101871157
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.43 x 2.84 x 24.26 cm
• 23,278 in Essays, Journals & Letters
• 413,475 in Social Sciences (Books)

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Against Everything

The prickly pleasures of mark greif’s rants about contemporary culture..

For a collection of essays about contemporary culture, Against Everything , by n+1 magazine co-founder Mark Greif, begins in an unlikely place: walking the perimeter of Walden Pond, accompanied by the spirit of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s curmudgeonly presence floated above Greif’s childhood in the Massachusetts suburbs, not far from the site of the transcendentalist’s one-room cabin. Greif describes venerating the “principle” of Thoreau long before he was old enough to read his writings, visiting the pond with his mother, who made a ritual of musing, “I wonder what he would have thought of that?” “I knew a ‘philosopher,’ ” Greif writes in the preface, “to be a mind that was unafraid to be against everything.”

By evoking Thoreau, Greif aligns himself with one of the more neglected traditions of the essay: the highbrow polemic, a vanishing art in an era in which the personal often eclipses the philosophical. (In the introduction to this year’s Best American Essays , editor Robert Atwan laments that the intellectual salvos of another transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, have fallen out of favor due to their “chilly impersonality” and exerted “little influence on future essayists.”) Greif sometimes appears as a character in the essays of Against Everything —most of which were previously published in n+1 —but he emphasizes that he picks at the seams of his own hypocrisies only to uncover the self-deceptions that also ensnare us, his readers. Instead of revealing an “I,” he attacks a “we.” But there’s an untrammeled optimism in being against everything—which, for Greif, entails being for something better than what already exists. The essays have a habit of changing direction in midair, sticking the landing as earnest entreaties for change. There’s a whiff of 19 th -century utopianism floating through this collection, which seems to harbor a belief that the right ideas, well-communicated, could make the world a better place.

The first essay in the collection, “Against Exercise,” from the inaugural 2004 issue of n+1 , remains one of Greif’s best, and establishes a paradigm for the rest of the book to follow. It transforms a seemingly straightforward habit—going to the gym and sweating out some calories—into a symptom that reveals a society gone wrong. In an age when physical well-being has become, at least for those who can afford it, easier to maintain than ever before, Greif accuses us of needlessly “disposing of the better portion of our lives in life preservation.” He harangues us to consider what we could be accomplishing with the time we spend lifting weights or logging miles, hoarding healthfulness in tiny increments. “It might have been naïve to think the new human freedom would push us toward a society of public pursuits, like Periclean Athens, or of simple delight in what exists, as in Eden,” he admits—but if so, Greif is not too cool to admit disappointment. At the end of another essay—which levels a similar critique against health-food culture—he asks, “If, in this day and age, we rejected the need to live longer, what would rich Westerners live for instead?”

Of course, the promise to find fault with everything is not the most naturally winning premise for a book of essays. This is doubly true when the essays are coming from someone who earnestly name-drops the likes of Pericles, Thoreau, Flaubert, and Epicurus in rapid succession. The book succeeds on the strength of its deadpan and sometimes disarmingly bizarre humor. (“Exerciser, what do you see in the mirrored gym wall?” Greif intones in the first essay. “You make the faces associated with pain, with tears, with orgasm. … You groan as if pressing on your bowels.”) It’s especially important that most of the laughs come at Greif’s expense. “This is not a book of critique of things I don’t do,” he writes in the preface. “It’s a book of critique of things I do.” At the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, he is the “little bourgeois” who cringes to think how this ragtag democracy appears “from boardroom windows high above.” In the book’s most personal entry, previously published only in German, Greif seeks to remedy his failure to appreciate the cultural importance of hip-hop by trying, in his mid-30s, to teach himself to rap. “It’s a fortunate fate to have your lifetime be contemporary with the creation of a major art form,” he writes. “Embarrassing, then, not to have understood it, or appreciated it, or become an enthusiast, even a fanatic, from the first.” More compromising than this revelation, however, is the figure Greif cuts practicing his bars on the subway. He has judged us, but he has also prostrated himself for our review.

The essays come off not as posturing, but as the exertions of a formidable mind using every tool at its disposal for what Greif considers an all-important task. The book is organized loosely by theme—body, music, visual culture, and so on—with a series of musings titled “The Meaning of Life,” Parts I–IV, interspersed between the sections as a kind of philosophical backbone. In the first of these pieces, Greif looks to Gustave Flaubert’s personal credo of “aestheticism,” in which every part of life is treated as a work of art, and Thoreau’s “perfectionism,” in which the improvement of the self becomes the purpose of existence, in search of methods for achieving happiness. Greif calls the modern self-help genre a “debased” form of perfectionism. But his book also aspires to provide a kind of self-help, just of a higher order.

No matter how broad a “you” or “we” Greif addresses, his essays stem, of course, from one person’s particular interests and experience. When Greif pillories, say, New York hipsters, his points feel acutely and attentively observed. Occasionally, however, a narrowness of perspective undermines the book’s sweeping second-person. Its least convincing installment applies the framework of Marxist critique—a familiar approach for n+1 —to the contents of YouTube, alleging but not explaining how the disappearance of videos for copyright infringement reveals “what They think of us, and how we should feel about Them.” Another essay, about the role of police in democracy, feels more relevant to the era of Occupy Wall Street protests than to the current moment of Black Lives Matter, though it was published in 2015.

The word we is, in some ways, the riskiest pronoun for a writer to use: It raises the question of who is included, introducing a binary that invites the reader to either opt in or opt out. It’s a mark of the thrilling force of Greif’s reasoning, and of his writing’s palpable sincerity, that I, for one, felt justly implicated, absorbed from the start into the receiving end of his rebuke. Then again, I fit squarely into the class of people Greif clearly envisions as his audience, a category that seems broader in some essays and narrower in others; in his prologue, Greif aims the book at “the middle classes, or people in the rich nations, or Americans and Europeans and their peers the world over.” One of Greif’s early pieces, “Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop,” explains why the word we is “the most important grammatical tic” in the band’s lyrics—and perhaps also suggests why it crops up so often in these essays. Invoking a “we,” Greif writes, represents an “imagined collectivity” that “may shade into the thought of all the other listeners besides you, in their rooms or cars alone, singing these same bits of lyrics.”

Greif writes to dress down his imagined collectivity, but also, it seems, to summon us up, into existence. “[Y]ou cannot strike the colossus,” he says in “The Philosophy of Pop.” “But you can defy it with words or signs.” An essay can’t overthrow the status quo anymore than a pop song can raise an army—but the best ones are propelled by their ambition to try.

Against Everything by Mark Greif. Pantheon.

Read the rest of the pieces in the Slate Book Review .

BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Book Review: Mark Greif’s “Against Everything” — But For Nothing?

Mark Greif’s analyses can be sharply counter-intuitive, but once we absorb the meaning of his criticism there’s less to go forward with than we expect.

Against Everything by Mark Greif. Penguin Random House, 328 pages, 28.95.

By Matt Hanson

In his introduction to Against Everything , n+1 magazine co-founder Mark Greif’s new collection of essays, Grief clarifies what its bold title really means: “To wish to be against everything is to want the world to be bigger than all of it, disposed to dissolve rules and compromises in a gallon or a drop, while an ocean of possibility rolls around us.”

In Against Everything , Greif takes some of our current trends (hipsters, foodie culture), popular entertainments (reality TV, YouTube, Radiohead, rap and punk rock) and social issues (the semiotics of police, the financial crisis, Occupy) seriously enough to criticize them as thoroughly as any of the so-called highbrow arts. Greif explains that he isn’t trying to cast judgment from the lofty heights of the ivory tower: “this is not a book of critique of things I don’t do. It’s a book of critique of things I do. Habits in which I am joined by a class of people, call them the middle classes, or people in the rich nations, or Americans and Europeans the world over. I want to talk about you.”

This is both the strength and the weakness of Grief’s critique; in its earnest effort to be universally applicable, incisive insights and useful arguments lead up to gauzy conclusions that only gesture towards the kinds of changes encouraged by his arguments. Greif’s analyses can be sharply counter-intuitive, but once we absorb the meaning of his criticism there’s less to go forward with than we expect.

His deconstruction of reality TV, particularly Keeping Up With the Kardashians , shows the vapidity and sterility of the family as portrayed on the popular reality series. There’s nothing very interesting about the Kardashians (“a family born under the sign of plastic surgery”), which is part of their soporific appeal.The family seems interchangeable, a carousel of branding and conspicuous lassitude, not only because all their first names begin with the letter K.

All except for one, of course: the stepfather Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic athlete who was the running gag of the women-dominated family until he changed genders, became Caitlin (barely missing assimilation by the ubiquitous letter K), and became the most famous of the bunch, which Greif reads as “either the ultimate self-assertion of the vanished patriarchal order, of achievement, contest, whiteness, maleness — the long-ago real Olympian proving he can do what it takes to stay on top even to the point of becoming female — or it is patriarchy’s ultimate abdication.”

Greif is also a very incisive decoder of the semiotics of the police. Law enforcement has always been a contentious subject, given that police are often at odds with at least some aspect of society. But is this by design? Delving deeper into the meaning of police as they relate to law enforcement, Greif illuminates an important paradox about their social role: “it is always hard to remind or convince police that their stated loyalty is to the Constitution … a bad consequence is that it’s quite difficult to make police feel responsible for civil-rights violations or unjust laws, since rights and the law of the polity are not theirs to know or decide.”

Citing a police reformer’s conversation with the Oakland PD, Greif illuminates the gulf many police have over what their job really means: is it about catching crooks, as many in the force understand it, or is it a more complex task, to uphold the law and the Constitution? The question is especially relevant now, given the disturbing nationwide wave of shootings of African-Americans and the clearly urgent need for comprehensive police reform.

For an extremely popular and well-respected “rock” group, Radiohead have always stood at a critical angle to the utopian bliss offered by pop music. Radiohead has made anthemic music for the alienated among us, creating an often eerie and obscure soundscape. Greif’s analysis of Radiohead’s hermetic take on pop music leads him a provocative consideration of the value of privacy, emotional and intellectual, in an overwhelming media environment. For him, Radiohead’s enigmatic quality affirms the individual will to reject conventional society and its politics.

Public Enemy’s Chuck D once asserted that “most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp.” As a good liberal, Greif wants to express solidarity but sees the ironies there, and is very good on the awkward political relationship between his love of hip-hop and his whiteness. He describes his self-conscious attempts to learn to rap and the extremely sensitive position this puts him in, socially speaking. What could have been a tritely humorous essay about another geeky white boy trying to emulate hip-hop culture becomes an interesting tour through the cultural matrix, and an anguished exploration of the embedded meanings related to dress, language, public presentation, and Otherness.

But not all the essays in Against Everything are as analytically rich. In “Against Exercise” Greif deconstructs gym culture and its heavy-handed emphasis on bodily perfection, arguing that the way our culture fetishizes the body re-entrenches the obsession with it’s ideal image and flaunts the endless public preening of dutiful maintenance. The argument is less appealing to me than it was when I first read it in N+1 ’s inaugural issue about ten years ago. I’m older now, and a lot less sarcastic about the value of working out for its own sake, regardless of its Sisyphean repetition and absurdity.

Essayist and Editor Mark Greif. Photo: Roderick Aichinger.

The same goes for Greif’s attitude towards foodie culture. After painstakingly debunking the status symbol of exotic food obsession, especially for upper middle class Westerners, Grief shrugs the meaning of his critique away by meekly asserting that “we have no language but health … health is our model of all things invisible and unfelt.” Fair enough, but there’s also an icky anecdote about a friend who, whenever he is about to eat something fatty “especially meat fats or hydrogenated oils, he imagines the interior arteries of his heart becoming clogged with a yellow-white substance, like margarine or petroleum jelly.” Thanks for sharing? It’s hard not to literalize the problems posed by the healthy food craze, but detailing other people’s food fears in uselessly literal language is not exactly furthering the discourse.

His analysis of other topics comes to the brink of a payoff and then inexplicably falls away. The sexualizing of young people, given that consumer society’s acceptable age limit for nymphets is lowering every year, is a problem that deserves our attention. There’s a constant media drumbeat encouraging young people to see themselves as sexual beings early and to view this as a form of cultural liberation — to be seen, and to be desired, is to find personal authentic personal empowerment.

After diagnosing the problem in the Best American Essay nominated piece “Afternoon of the Sex Children” he concludes: “the only hope would be, wherever possible, to deny ourselves in our fatuousness and build a barricade, penning us inside, quarantining this epoch that we must learn to name and disparage.” I’m not entirely sure how what Greif proposes could even happen, let alone what it would mean even if it did.

I’m equally fuzzy on what conclusion should be drawn about the social usefulness of YouTube. The opportunity to have a kind of egalitarian public space, filled with the kinds of self-expression ordinary people find interesting and the possibility for a free and open exchange of world culture is wonderful. But, predictably, it’s quickly become corporatized, saturated with ads, and the copyrights on various material often limits one’s exposure. Again, true, but I don’t think this is terribly new. “YouTube keeps giving us one piece of news that, though never novel, does stay news: what They think of us, and how we should feel about Them.” Which is how, exactly?

Throughout the book, Greif admires the great nonconformist thinkers such as Flaubert, the stoic Epicurus, and especially Henry David Thoreau. Of course, it’s unfair to diminish Greif by putting him in the shadow of these giants. But it’s worth noting that each of these proud nonconformists rejected the status quo with an equally passionate belief in the value of something held apart from the common stock. For Flaubert the creative writer, it was a crystalline prose style; for Epicurus the stoic philosopher, it was the discipline of self-mastery; the rebellious Thoreau made civil disobedience his moral and political line in the sand. Against Everything is filled with articulate, informed critiques of much that is mediocre and banal in the postmodern world, but comes up short in suggesting what kinds of thinking (or actions) might be needed to replace them.

Matt Hanson is a critic for The Arts Fuse living outside Boston. His writing has appeared in The Millions , 3QuarksDaily , and Flak Magazine (RIP), where he was a staff writer. He blogs about movies and culture for LoveMoneyClothes . His poetry chapbook was published by Rhinologic Press.

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Against Everything: Essays

• Staff Reviews

"I am very much against this book. In fact, you should NOT read page 77. (Do NOT read before, during, or after reading  The Correspondence  by J. D. Daniels.) And whatever you do, do not read on your bus/subway ride, in the Public Garden during spring, or in the woods, or anywhere NEAR a Thoreuvian pond, or anywhere that might cause you to interrogate that sticky underbelly of the human condition, or the glory of it. I hope this book does not help you. Go watch  Friends  instead."

See all my recommendations »

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The essays in Against Everything are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada)   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

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What is ChatGPT? Here's everything you need to know about ChatGPT, the chatbot everyone's still talking about

• ChatGPT is getting a futuristic human update. 
• ChatGPT has drawn users at a feverish pace and spurred Big Tech to release other AI chatbots.
• Here's how ChatGPT works — and what's coming next.

OpenAI's blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT is getting a new update. 

On Monday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-4o for ChatGPT, a new version of the bot that can hold conversations with users in a very human tone. The new version of the chatbot will also have vision abilities.

The futuristic reveal quickly prompted jokes about parallels to the movie "Her," with some calling the chatbot's new voice " cringe ."

The move is a big step for the future of AI-powered virtual assistants, which tech companies have been racing to develop.

Since its release in 2022, hundreds of millions of people have experimented with the tool, which is already changing how the internet looks and feels to users.

Users have flocked to ChatGPT to improve their personal lives and boost productivity . Some workers have used the AI chatbot to develop code , write real estate listings , and create lesson plans, while others have made teaching the best ways to use ChatGPT a career all to itself.

ChatGPT offers dozens of plug-ins to those who subscribe to ChatGPT Plus subscription. An Expedia one can help you book a trip, while an OpenTable one will get nab you a dinner reservation. And last month, OpenAI launched Code Interpreter, a version of ChatGPT that can code and analyze data .

While the personal tone of conversations with an AI bot like ChatGPT can evoke the experience of chatting with a human, the technology, which runs on " large language model tools, " doesn't speak with sentience and doesn't "think" the way people do. 

That means that even though ChatGPT can explain quantum physics or write a poem on command, a full AI takeover isn't exactly imminent , according to experts.

"There's a saying that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually give you Shakespeare," said Matthew Sag, a law professor at Emory University who studies copyright implications for training and using large language models like ChatGPT.

"There's a large number of monkeys here, giving you things that are impressive — but there is intrinsically a difference between the way that humans produce language, and the way that large language models do it," he said. 

Chatbots like ChatGPT are powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques to make predictions to string words together in a meaningful way. They not only tap into a vast amount of vocabulary and information, but also understand words in context. This helps them mimic speech patterns while dispatching an encyclopedic knowledge. 

Other tech companies like Google and Meta have developed their own large language model tools, which use programs that take in human prompts and devise sophisticated responses.

Despite the AI's impressive capabilities, some have called out OpenAI's chatbot for spewing misinformation , stealing personal data for training purposes , and even encouraging students to cheat and plagiarize on their assignments. 

Some recent efforts to use chatbots for real-world services have proved troubling. In 2023, the mental health company Koko came under fire after its founder wrote about how the company used GPT-3 in an experiment to reply to users. 

Koko cofounder Rob Morris hastened to clarify on Twitter that users weren't speaking directly to a chatbot, but that AI was used to "help craft" responses. 

Read Insider's coverage on ChatGPT and some of the strange new ways that both people and companies are using chat bots: 

The tech world's reception to ChatGPT:

Microsoft is chill with employees using ChatGPT — just don't share 'sensitive data' with it.

Microsoft's investment into ChatGPT's creator may be the smartest $1 billion ever spent

ChatGPT and generative AI look like tech's next boom. They could be the next bubble.

The ChatGPT and generative-AI 'gold rush' has founders flocking to San Francisco's 'Cerebral Valley'

Insider's experiments: 

I asked ChatGPT to do my work and write an Insider article for me. It quickly generated an alarmingly convincing article filled with misinformation.

I asked ChatGPT and a human matchmaker to redo my Hinge and Bumble profiles. They helped show me what works.

I asked ChatGPT to reply to my Hinge matches. No one responded.

I used ChatGPT to write a resignation letter. A lawyer said it made one crucial error that could have invalidated the whole thing .

Read ChatGPT's 'insulting' and 'garbage' 'Succession' finale script

An Iowa school district asked ChatGPT if a list of books contains sex scenes, and banned them if it said yes. We put the system to the test and found a bunch of problems.

Developments in detecting ChatGPT: 

Teachers rejoice! ChatGPT creators have released a tool to help detect AI-generated writing

A Princeton student built an app which can detect if ChatGPT wrote an essay to combat AI-based plagiarism

Professors want to 'ChatGPT-proof' assignments, and are returning to paper exams and requesting editing history to curb AI cheating

ChatGPT in society: 

BuzzFeed writers react with a mix of disappointment and excitement at news that AI-generated content is coming to the website

ChatGPT is testing a paid version — here's what that means for free users

A top UK private school is changing its approach to homework amid the rise of ChatGPT, as educators around the world adapt to AI

Princeton computer science professor says don't panic over 'bullshit generator' ChatGPT

DoNotPay's CEO says threat of 'jail for 6 months' means plan to debut AI 'robot lawyer' in courtroom is on ice

It might be possible to fight a traffic ticket with an AI 'robot lawyer' secretly feeding you lines to your AirPods, but it could go off the rails

Online mental health company uses ChatGPT to help respond to users in experiment — raising ethical concerns around healthcare and AI technology

What public figures think about ChatGPT and other AI tools:

What Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and 12 other business leaders think about AI tools like ChatGPT

Elon Musk was reportedly 'furious' at ChatGPT's popularity after he left the company behind it, OpenAI, years ago

CEO of ChatGPT maker responds to schools' plagiarism concerns: 'We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested in math class'

A theoretical physicist says AI is just a 'glorified tape recorder' and people's fears about it are overblown

'The most stunning demo I've ever seen in my life': ChatGPT impressed Bill Gates

Ashton Kutcher says your company will probably be 'out of business' if you're 'sleeping' on AI

ChatGPT's impact on jobs: 

AI systems like ChatGPT could impact 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, with administrative and legal roles some of the most at risk, Goldman Sachs report says

Jobs are now requiring experience with ChatGPT — and they'll pay as much as $800,000 a year for the skill

Related stories

ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles that AI is most likely to replace.

AI is going to eliminate way more jobs than anyone realizes

It's not AI that is going to take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI might, economist says

4 careers where workers will have to change jobs by 2030 due to AI and shifts in how we shop, a McKinsey study says

Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Meta are paying salaries as high as $900,000 to attract generative AI talent

How AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the workforce:

10 ways artificial intelligence is changing the workplace, from writing performance reviews to making the 4-day workweek possible

Managers who use AI will replace managers who don't, says an IBM exec

How ChatGPT is shaping industries: 

ChatGPT is coming for classrooms, hospitals, marketing departments, and everything else as the next great startup boom emerges

Marketing teams are using AI to generate content, boost SEO, and develop branding to help save time and money, study finds

AI is coming for Hollywood. 'It's amazing to see the sophistication of the images,' one of Christopher Nolan's VFX guy says.

AI is going to offer every student a personalized tutor, founder of Khan Academy says

A law firm was fined $5,000 after one of its lawyers used ChatGPT to write a court brief riddled with fake case references

How workers are using ChatGPT to boost productivity:  

CheatGPT: The hidden wave of employees using AI on the sly

I used ChatGPT to talk to my boss for a week and she didn't notice. Here are the other ways I use it daily to get work done.

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• Main content

Against Everything: Essays

Description.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The essays in Against Everything are learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious, reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. Key topics are the tyranny of exercise, the folly of food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of pop music, the rise and fall of the hipster, the uses of reality TV, the impact of protest movements, and the crisis of policing. Four of the selections address, directly and unironically, the meaning of life—how to find a philosophical stance to adopt toward one’s self and the world. Mark Greif manages to revivify the thought and spirit of the greatest of American dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, for our time and historical situation. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine • San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • National Post (Canada)   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

About the Author

Mark Greif is co-founder of the literary and intellectual journal n+1 . He is also currently an associate professor at The New School in New York.

Praise for Against Everything: Essays

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: The Guardian • The Atlantic • New York Magazine  •  San Francisco Chronicle • Paris Review • Nylon • Literary Hub • Frieze   National Book Critics’ Circle Award Finalist New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice   Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Diamonson-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay “Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything... Against Everything  is really a book on a single subject: contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone who would buy such a book, or read a column about such a book—in short, yourself—might right now be living. It’s meant to be consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think...Greif’s argument—and this is what separates him from the usual solver of the times—is that what’s killing us is deeply embedded in our social and economic system. It’s not the gym that’s the problem. It’s the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a solution to something. Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it’s not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against . . . everything." ⎻⎻    Louis Menand,   New Yorker “Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his hand . . . . There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core . . . intriguing . . . embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he writes, anywhere.” ⎻⎻ Daphne Merkin,  The New York Times Book Review “His prose is limpid and plainspoken…. [H]e helps defamiliarize our present moment and points us toward alternate ways of living.…  [Greif] wields the forgotten past like a scalpel, cutting away diseased growths to find still-living flesh. In his essays, he seems to ask: Can we find ways of recovering dissent by looking in the least likely places? Can we uncover a buried past of critical opposition?” ⎻⎻   Nicholas Dames, Nation   “Greif aligns himself with one of the more neglected traditions of the essay: the highbrow polemic, a vanishing art in an era in which the personal often eclipses the philosophical…. But there’s an untrammeled optimism in being against everything—which, for Greif, entails being for something better than what already exists…. It’s a mark of the thrilling force of Greif’s reasoning, and of his writing’s palpable sincerity, that I, for one, felt justly implicated, absorbed from the start.” ⎻⎻   Nora Caplan-Bricker, Slate   “It is difficult to do justice to the subtlety and wit of Greif’s arguments, which in synopsis tend to sound bombastic…. [H]is method … draws the reader, through observation and analogy, from the particular to the general…. The reader is asked to join the dialogue…. The essay – like the debating hall, the forum, or indeed the literary magazine – is a space in which we take sides to practice democracy.” ⎻⎻   Ben Eastham, Times Literary Supplement   “The essays of Brooklyn literary magazine n+1 co-founder Mark Greif have been questioning our conventional wisdom for years. . . . Collected in Against Everything , they provide a refreshing approach to intellectual dissent, if not its validation for our day and age.” ⎻⎻ Best Books of the Year, National Post (Canada)   “Mark Greif’s essay on the Kafkaesque nature of the modern gym, ‘Against Exercise,’ is already a classic; and his new book, Against Everything , tells us it’s not just the gym, it’s also our music, our culture, our political life – everything about us.” ⎻⎻    Aravind Adiga, Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year "Mark Greif's Against Everything— as its title suggests—matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays risk embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life—hipsters, foodies, gym-goers—so that we might see these characters in ourselves, and treat them with, if not more kindness, more interest." ⎻⎻ Kate Womersley, The Spectator (UK) Best Books of the Year “Isn't it elitist to talk about punk as if it were a text? To juxtapose Rousseau with a dating show? To say an intense workout is reminiscent of Kafka? … Against Everything, a new essay collection by Mark Greif … approaches populist topics like exercise, food, and pop culture from a decidedly not-populist perspective in order to deconstruct them, see how they work, and understand what they really mean to us. While the collection's title is delightfully antagonistic…the contents are not necessarily so. Greif's point is not to tell you how to live, but to encourage you to really think about how you're living.” ⎻⎻   Lauren Oyler , VICE "Against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness,” writes n+1 co-founder Mark Greif...Greif isn’t a doomsayer, but a smart man, soused in decency and fellow feeling. He would like to know the meaning of life...Civil disobedience is a lived way to counter plutocracy. Consider Occupy Wall Street, an action in which Greif participated. “Fight the Power.” That’s to live." ⎻⎻   Peter Lewis ,  San Francisco Chronicle “Dark, wonderful essays on contemporary derangement . . . academically current but free of jargon; discontented but free of resignation; gladiatorial but free of truculence; sincere but free of gentility. . . . [T]o a reader of my generation, [they] have taken on the finish of classics.”  ⎻⎻   Gideon Lewis-Kraus ,  Bookforum “These smart and bracingly negative essays will break you out of your Facebook-induced stupor.” ⎻⎻  Esquire “Greif’s essays … ask ‘What is this phenomenon really about?,’ ‘What does it mean?,’ ‘What does it say about us?’ … Greif doesn’t lack for nerve and, whatever the object of discussion, his procedure is to ‘look steadily at it, and think.’ … I was impressed above all by the resourcefulness of his prose, the concentrated intelligence of the exercise.… Although he can make us feel the strength and rigidity of the iron cage of capitalist rationalism in a manner reminiscent of the European masters of sociological pessimism, he also treasures the capacity of the self-reliant individual to re-create himself.”  ⎻⎻   Stefan Collini,  London Review of Books "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. An intellectual’s job is to provoke thought and argument, and this Greif does as well as anyone writing today."  ⎻⎻ Adam Kirsch,  Tablet “This wonderful collection of essays about contemporary American life is not only thought-provoking but also a pedigree version of that rarest beast, ‘the public understanding of the humanities.’… Underneath a fox-like curiosity in the seeming ephemera of popular culture is a hedgehog concern with how we experience all these and what that experience means. … [T]his is how academics and intellectuals ought to write for the (mythical) general reader.” ⎻⎻   Robert Eaglestone, Times Higher Education Supplement “[M]aybe you’ve missed cofounder Mark Greif’s years of essayistic genius for [ n+1 ]. This book is a one stop shop to fix that. In thoughtful, deeply informed, nuanced works of criticism, Greif makes the case “Against Exercise,” questions “What Was the Hipster?” and delves into “Octomom and the Market in Babies.” . . . [F]ans of in-depth cultural criticism will have the perfect companion in this compendium.” ⎻⎻   Claire Fallon, Huffington Post   “[A] prodigy in that class of gifted and talented writers responsible for bringing us  n+1 , the magazine that effectively remade the intellectual scene in New York City[,]… Greif showed everyone how it could and should be done….  Against Everything , a collection that features many of Greif’s best essays, offers a good occasion to consider what it was that made his early work so singularly powerful.”  ⎻⎻ Timothy Aubry,   Los Angeles Review of Books “These essays carve out a space of silence . . . a void levered open for new knowledge to rush in and fill. . . .  Against Everything  is the work of a gadfly essayist, not a windbag: in it, Greif is nasty and fun and also takes us to new and spacious places.” ⎻⎻  Josephine Livingstone, The Awl   “Greif has outdone himself (and this is saying something, because his work has consistently blown us away) with this collection of critical essays . . . Everything is brilliantly disseminated, clearly argued, and will leave you wanting to host (or at least attend) dinner parties where you can show off your newfound knowledge.” ⎻⎻    Kristin Iversen, Nylon   “The best essays … read as if the Roland Barthes of Mythologies , or the LA-exiled Theodor Adorno of Minima Moralia , were deposited amid post-millennial American culture. . . . The argumentative spine of Against Everything is a series of more or less explicit reflections on the category of experience, and whether it is ethical to want to opt out of experience, given the debased forms of it given us today.” ⎻⎻    Brian Dillon, 4Columns   “The best claim to be his generation’s finest essayist comes in the concluding essay on Thoreau, the Occupy movement and his own generation. Taken as a whole the book is a powerful injunction to look, listen and reflect, our surest means of defiance against the encroaching dimness.” ⎻⎻   Richard Godwin, Evening Standard (UK)   "Greif is a critic of the modern American condition...a dazzling intellectual, and like all the best philosophers, he thinks we all can and should live our lives like philosophers. To read Against Everything is a good start on that path." ⎻⎻ Christian Lorentzen, NY1 “Mark Greif writes a contrarian, skeptical prose that is at the same time never cynical: it opens out on to beauty and the possibility of change.” ⎻⎻ Zadie Smith   “The ideas and images I discover in Mark Greif’s essays stay with me for years, and become part of the way I experience and understand the world. I couldn’t be happier that this book is being published so I can read them all over again.” ⎻⎻ Sheila Heti   “Mark Greif's essays can cut, they can connect, and they can soar. Greif inhabits the center of all his subjects, from Nietzsche to Nas, but there is no display or cynicism here, only a powerful mind thinking hard about our culture and our politics. ‘The instant for philosophy is always now,’ he writes, because it can take forever. Now is Mark Greif's time.” ⎻⎻ Sean Wilentz   “Mark Greif is one of the most consistently interesting American writers of the last decade, and this book proves it. I read him for the pleasure of never knowing where his brain's going next. Here's the first sentence of his essay on cops: ‘A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you.’ That's the kind of weird and accurate observation I want from an essayist. Get down with a writer who's dogged in his attempt to understand us better, and wise in knowing it's hopeless.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan   “Anyone who hasn't discovered Mark Greif's unforgettable essays yet in the pages of n+1 —the country's most powerful literary mag, which he cofounded—will thank me for demanding you rush out to buy his grasp-you-by-the-throat collection Against Everything. Like James Wood or Susan Sontag, George  Orwell or Randall Jarrell, Greif defines our age yet writes with such wit and grace, he'll last forever. A must-read collection by one of our preeminent thinkers.” — Mary Karr   “I love Mark Greif. No living essayist effects the destruction of everything other people hold dear with a lighter or more elegant touch. An unmitigated delight.” — Elif Batuman “Mark Greif’s book proposes the impossible thing, a phenomenology of the present─at a moment in which the present is slipping by so fast that anything we dare call that is already signed, sealed and delivered to the past. Hip hop, food shows, current events like war and the police, hipsters, exercises, the youth culture─ this list omits the deliberate and attractive heterogeneity of Greif’s notes on the everyday, his attempt to capture its random contents before they are incorporated into some official academic field or trivialized into familiar themes and slogans by an omnivorous public sphere. It isn’t a novel, it isn’t a journal either (which you could ‘dip into’), it’s probably not a blog, it is deliberately unfinished (in the sense of ‘to be continued’, but maybe by all or each of us); but it is certainly wonderful reading which cuts into the present before the latter disappears.” — Fredric Jameson   “Mark Greif makes a case for so much: for curiosity and precision, for second glances, for reconsidering, for paying attention to the world and not being satisfied by what it’s become, or ever been. I found the crackle of rigor in these essays, but also so much tenderness and awe.” — Leslie Jamison   “Mark Greif is the best essayist of my generation. No one is more modern or more classical – or more stylish. This has its alarming effects. When you read Against Everything, you will vow to change your life.” ⎻⎻ Adam Thirlwell

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