The Last in a Line

Before John Updike became a world-famous novelist, he was a letter-writer—a self-consciously stylish and confident correspondent. Writing to his family, to friends, to former and future lovers, to adversaries and rivals, Updike honed and mastered his literary legerdemain through the post. Reviewing a selection that incorporates nearly a half-century of Updike’s letters, Vivian Gornick finds that “the tone of voice in which these letters are written is singularly overriding….Updike’s pose of self-assurance, from an astonishingly early age, is really remarkable. Sometimes it makes him wise; mainly it makes him pompous.” It reminds us also of the strengths and limits of an older literary tradition—a tradition known not for introspection but instead for willful self-expression. “At almost no time, in reading these letters, do we stumble on a risky bit of soul-searching, a disheveled piece of self-knowledge, an inappropriate confession. At all times, we are in the presence of a writer who never loses sight of his gift. Read “John Updike, Letter Writer”

Edge of the Void

TikTok’s adoption in the United States in 2018 marked a shift in American culture: It was the only big social media platform that didn’t give you a prickly misanthropic hangover after using it. But it had its drawbacks as well: It taught its users to stop thinking in words and instead to think in images, to self-produce and self-promote through short vertical videos. It also captured the attention of a younger generation, all while becoming a geopolitical pawn caught between Chinese and American interests. In a new book about TikTok, Every Screen on the Planet, Erin Schwartz argues that “both of these stories—of TikTok’s cultural history and its fraught politics” should be told in tandem. While they might at first appear to move in different directions, she concludes, they instead, when told together, demonstrate just how incompatible “a humane Internet and the structures that currently determine its shape” are. “It’s strange,” Schwartz writes, “to consider that a popular app might cease to exist because two states are unwilling to let it exist outside of their control.” But if that is the case, it also speaks to one of the problems with the Internet writ large: It never belongs to its users. Read “TikTok’s Incomplete Story”