Phoebe Maltz Bovy

I have a new piece out in Tablet, profiling Phoebe Maltz Bovy and reading her work as a contribution to the ethics of self-interpretation.

Check out Phoebe’s Substack—and, for Blake Smith completionists, here’s another petulant aside cut from the final copy, this time making fun of our incoming vice president (and not, as readers lamented last time, a vulnerable 30-something Taylor Swift fan)…

Once beloved by the NPR-listening class for his role as anti-Trump explainer/denigrator of the white working class Vance serves, like so many other graduates from elite colleges with cushy media and political deals, as a diversity hire, a living emblem of his group, pudgily embodying a demographic that supposedly deserves more attention, representation, and other such euphemisms for permission to air resentments (preferably, cultural ones, as incoherently and passionately as possible) through an avatar whose job likely depends on his never actually fixing their problems. Like Barack Obama and countless younger would-be elites, Vance began his political career by telling a convincing sob-story about his background. Although a second Trump term will bring many changes to American politics, it will not free us from the political class composed of writers of whiny trauma narratives. We remain under the rule of the college admissions essay.