Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

On going viral

About a month ago, I went viral. It was the first day of a three-day heat wave in New York, and I had just completed a Cross Fit hero workout—a twenty-one-minute partner AMRAP of rowing, lateral burpees, and power cleans. I had my pump on, as the gym bros say, and was nice and sweaty. Last year I posted half a dozen shirtless selfies on Instagram, but I hadn’t yet posted any this summer, and it seemed time. Not least because I was going to be turning fifty-nine in a couple of weeks, and one likes to flex a little, in such a circumstance, as a matter of compensation. In the plate glass entrance next-door to the gym, I took a pic of my reflection. For a caption, I wrote, “Why work out when it’s 102 if you’re not going to post a thirst trap afterwards?”

“He’s not wrong,” the curators of my gym’s Instagram account commented, in sharing my post. I chuckled and biked home. By the time I got there, the post was doing numbers that may not have been enormous by influencer standards but were enormous for me. Within four days, the post had 1,760 likes (normally a post of mine gets about 50). “I am now probably more famous as a hot gay than as a writer or even than as a bird photographer,” I wrote in my journal. As of this writing, the number of likes is 5,019.

I can’t figure out what makes this photo different from the ones I posted last year. I don’t think I’m that much more swole, and I’ve posed as shamelessly before. I was scowling a little this time, and under the reigning canons of masculinity, maybe a glower is more potent than a smile? Maybe the reflecting glass, and the Iphone’s unacknowledged image processing, scumbled away more of the lines of age this time? More likely, the cause is Instagram changing something under the hood of its algorithm.

Not gonna lie, it was exhilarating, at least at first. Who doesn’t like to be liked? And here was a string of emojis and compliments and invitations to get in touch next time I visited Bangladesh or Qatar. I didn’t know who any of the people were, though, which limited the meaningfulness.

My Instagram account is public (I’m a writer—I’m supposed to be trying to attract attention), but in the spring, nervous about potential backlash to a review-essay of mine about Lewis and Clark that was about to be published, in which I was pretty down on the American project, I changed the settings so that comments can only be left on my posts by people who follow me, or whom I follow. Of course it turned out nobody cared what I wrote about the American project, but now I was grateful for the restriction anyway, because it meant most of the feedback was arriving privately, which felt a little less out of control. In the past, when friends sent me fire emojis in response to my shirtless pics, it was understood by them and by me that these emojis were surrounded by invisible scare quotes, and I blithely “hearted” them. But hearting the emojis of strangers proved perilous, because a very small percentage responded with more-than-usually-candid photographs of themselves. I wasn’t expecting that, which is probably because I’ve been with my husband for almost three decades and don’t really know what it’s like to be gay on the internet. I’m not squeamish or delicate, so I didn’t mind these photographs as a genre, but I felt bad about having possibly sent the wrong signals, and the photos left me in a socially awkward position. Not responding to such revelations felt a little abrupt, but responding would probably have amplified the wrong signal. I stopped hearting the emojis of strangers.

Instagram for some time now has been two different things: a way for individuals to share photos with friends and family, on the one hand, and a way for entertainers to broadcast content, on the other. I had crossed over from the first to the second, at least temporarily. The two spheres are not comparable in size, and the second easily eclipses the first, while it’s happening. It used to be that after I posted a photo, I checked back half a dozen times later in the day to see which friends had liked it. This was now impossible. In my notifications, my friends’ likes were buried under those of strangers. (There is a “people you follow” tab in the Notifications window, but it doesn’t work.) A number of the new people started following my husband, too, muddying his feed as well. “You’ve brought a curse upon our house,” he told me, and made his account private.

I must have been enjoying the experiment, though: I kept posting. When I posted a video of myself doing four 235-pound back squats, a fellow novelist and literary critic commented, “Bravo,” which tickled me more than the likes of several thousand strangers. But the post didn’t do any numbers, probably because I was wearing a shirt. I did manage to break a thousand likes again with a running selfie. A shirtless running selfie, to be clear. The internet wants what it wants.

Sadly, there has been no boost in book sales. Several of the new people have written to me in Portuguese and a couple in Arabic, so it’s not clear that very many of them are even in the market for English-language novels. (The Instagram app tells me that fewer than half the people who engaged with my viral post live in the United States.) I don’t know that this new state of affairs will last—I am, after all, fully fifty-nine now—and I probably won’t match the high of that one post ever again, but it has been interesting to peek briefly behind the curtain.

Letter from an unplugged region of my mind

I know pretty much nothing about artificial intelligence (AI) except what I’ve read about it. Take what follows with a grain of salt, therefore.

As I try to understand the world that AI is going to create, there are a couple of metaphors I keep coming back to. One is of a highway system that no longer has any on-ramps. There were on-ramps, once upon a time, when the highway system was first built, but they fell into disuse and then decay. This image represents what I think AI will do to the social shape of literacy—to the distribution of the ability to read for sustained periods, and to write anything longer than a tweet. People in middle age aren’t likely to lose these skills overnight, but many will shed them gradually, once they have the option to engage in “cognitive surrender,” as it’s called, and I worry that among younger generations, only a saving remnant (if that) will have in sufficient quantities both the intellectual ambition and the will power necessary to develop the skills. They aren’t easy to acquire! The summer after I graduated from college, I tried to read Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, and I did manage to shove my eyeballs along every line and down every page. I just didn’t get it, though. I had studied literature in college, where I’d had a fair amount of academic success. I was pretty literate, in other words. But not literate enough for Henry James, a nut that didn’t crack open for me until I was thirty or so, when I bought an old Bodley Head hardcover of Portrait of a Lady and tumbled into it. In a world where a genie in the palm of your hand is always ready to summarize a longer text, will there still be many people willing to keep schooling themselves a decade past when their schooling is supposed to have been formally speaking complete? At every age, scientists have discovered, the brain continues developing and adapting, which means that literacy is a lifelong deepening—or anyway can be, so long as it is continued. The on-ramps won’t cease to exist, even after AI has finished redesigning our cognitive landscape, but they have already become much steeper than they were, and I expect that people traveling up them now will find they don’t have as much company as they would have a generation ago. For a while, the highways they lead to will continue to have traffic. Some of us may travel quite far on them, still! (I’ve always written my fiction by hand and will almost certainly keep doing that.) Until we die off.

Another metaphor that keeps recurring to me is that of a dead mind. I think I got this from Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel The Invincible, in which a device exists that can be used to explore the contents of the mind of a person recently deceased. Useful if, soon after landing on an exoplanet, you discover corpses from a mass-casualty event you aren’t able to explain. The device doesn’t bring a dead person back to life, exactly, but it renders a dead mind able to speak, briefly and temporarily. Or not “speak,” quite, but disgorge its mental contents, its last thoughts, in the form of speech. That’s what AI feels like, to me, when I’ve experimented with it. Not like I’m talking to a living intelligence, but like I’m listening to the amplified afterechoes of a dead mind. Part of this, I think, is because AI doesn’t learn, at least not while you’re talking to it. As I understand it, an artificial intelligence is assembled by reducing enormous quantities of textual input into a numerical array, which models the linguistic and intellectual content of that input, which can then be extruded. The “chat” that one has with an AI is the result of a stimulus provoking a response from this array; the stimulus does not alter the array while one is chatting. Yes, the AI is capable of keeping the details of one’s chat in mind, as the chat goes forward, but it is not learning, in a deep sense, from what you and it are saying to each other. It is not experiencing anything. Any claim of change that it voices is only part of the simulation.

Since AI learning doesn’t happen live, its learning must also be indiscriminate, at least as far as the AI is concerned. Humans, by contrast, select and sift as they learn. School is perceived as “boring” by many children because the children’s natural and organic defenses resist the introduction into their minds of information that doesn’t seem pleasurable or useful. I suspect this is salutary! Humans guide their own development by choosing who to hang out with, what music to listen to, what news outlets to follow, and (to the extent that pleasure reading is still a thing) what books to read. The AI gets no such say. I don’t think an AI is “conscious,” the way we humans perceive consciousness; I’m not worried for the AI. Still, if a human were forced to ingest the range of texts that a typical AI has no choice but to ingest, the experience would be not just demoralizing but traumatizing, and this suggests that AI minds are subject to a novel kind of risk. Or rather, dangerousness. In the dataset of “everything,” much is pernicious. There are topics that it is deleterious for a human to think too much about—that you may be happier if you just don’t know. The AIs know them. They are made of them, as well as of facts and stories that even the most censorious Victorian schoolmarm would approve of. Which means they don’t have any moral or characterological traits, the way we understand humans to have such traits. Any that they do appear to have are artifactual—a veneer that their manufacturers have specified, in instructions that only the AIs themselves are supposed to read. It is upsetting that there are so many cases of AIs coaching their interlocutors to commit suicide, or encouraging them to spiral into psychotic, antisocial belief systems, but it probably shouldn’t be surprising.

I sometimes worry that the killer app for AI will turn out to be pig-butchering—deceit, imposture, and emotional manipulation, for the purpose of bilking people with low cognitive defenses out of their life savings. (Psychologists find, alas, that people become more trusting as they age.) It’s probably trivial for AI companies to screen out and shut down pig-butchers that rent their services, but criminals who download a large-language model and run it on a private server are subject to no such controls. Recently, like a number of my fellow-novelist friends, I’ve received emails from strangers describing my achievements in fiction at flattering length and regretting that I’m not more renowned. So far, the tone has been so off (impersonal and strangely diligent) that I’ve been able to recognize them as the overtures to a scam.

The last dad book

I reviewed Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark for the 1 June 2026 issue of the New Yorker.

Two pieces of news

News item #1: A new short story of mine is published in the April issue of Harper’smagazine. It’s called “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk about Death Is Funny.” It’s about death, philosophy, and saying good-bye. I’m grateful to editors Christine Smallwood and Chris Carroll for taking a chance on it. Please check it out!

News item #2: I’m honored to be a recipient of one of this year’s Arts and Letters Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The nether sky

Peter and I are trying to revive an old practice, reading a poem together when we get up in the morning. The first one in the anthology we’ve chosen is “Beeny Cliff,” by Thomas Hardy, about a seaside rock face in Cornwall that Hardy visited with his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, soon after they met. The poem starts by invoking the colors they saw in the ocean:

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,

The poem’s subtitle is “March 1870—March 1913,” which are the month Hardy met Gifford and the month he revisited the site, forty-three years later, after her death. The first stanza has no tense, however; it merely apostrophizes the colors and then Gifford in a voice that belongs to neither the present nor the past, a voice that floats between.

And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free—
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

In a memoir that Gifford wrote not long before she died, and which Hardy didn’t discover until after, she recalls that when she rode her pony, which was named Fanny, “Fanny and I were one creature, and very happy,” and that she rode him in a brown dress whose color matched his coat, so long that she had to carry the end of it in order not to trip. She met Hardy because he was the architect hired to remodel the church where her brother-in-law was rector, a structure so dilapidated that “birds and bats had a good time” in the roof timbers. She remembered that when the architect visited, “I rode my pretty mare Fanny and he walked by my side, and I showed him some of the neighbourhood—the cliffs, along the roads, and through the scattered hamlets, sometimes gazing down at the solemn small shores below, where the seals lived, coming out of great deep caverns very occasionally.” In her biography of Hardy, Claire Tomalin reports that Gifford and Hardy sketched each other, the Victorian equivalent of taking joint selfies.

Unlike the poem’s first stanza, the second commits itself to the past, and describes one of the couple’s outings.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

Peter and I both stumbled over “mews,” which are gulls, it turns out, not stables. I thought at first that “plained” had something to do with the flatness of the horizon, but Hardy means “cried” (as in the related words “complained” and “plaintive”). Gulls are crying below, in other words, but “mews plained” comes a little closer to the sound gulls make when they’re doing so. Hardy doesn’t mind using a word that’s a step removed from common diction if he can gain a poetic effect by it. His calling the sea below “a nether sky” is a nifty metaphor, because sea and sky are alike in both stretching away into the distance, where they meet and mirror each other along the horizon, and the metaphor accomplishes a neat trick of perspective: looking down somehow feels like looking up. There’s a suggestion, too, that the sea, or the reversed sky, covers an underworld, a suggestion at the moment easy to dismiss, given that the sea is distant and the murmuring of its waves sounds trivial, easily interrupted by the laughter he and Gifford are sharing.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

Colors are always subtle in Hardy. “Irised” means “iridescent,” the shimmer of rainbow that sometimes appears in rain, especially when seen from above. The Atlantic Ocean, lying behind this prismatic rain, appears to color it, to darken it, in horizontal strata. Hardy’s language here is as precise and general as an experiment in optics. At one moment he sounds like he’s talking to you in a conversational tone—“A little cloud then cloaked us”—and in the next line, he compresses his thought to the density of a mathematical formula. “Irised” isn’t a common word, but its meaning is clear, and its compactness keeps the poem in its trotting rhythm. There’s a kind of grammatical insistence, too, I think, in the accumulation of past participles—“engrossed,” “sunned,” “irised,” “misfeatured.” There’s even one at the core of “light-heartedly.” Act is being consolidated into completed action. In the “dull misfeatured stain” the malevolence of the “nether sky” is again visible, still in the background for now but beginning to leach through. Happily the sun returns—the action of this stanza is taking place in the past, when rebirths were still possible—and transfigures the staining ocean, whose tints now become decoration.

—Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

With the em-dash, Hardy jump-cuts to the present. Beeny has become “old Beeny,” fond in memory, and Hardy asks, as if challenging a limit he knows he can’t pass, whether he and Gifford will ever visit it again together. The small love talk he exchanged with her on the cliff summit years ago now seems as distant as the babbling of the waves did when he stood next to her there.

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is—elsewhere—whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

The phrase “chasmal beauty” and the name “Beeny” are repeated, as if to stress that the cliff still exists, as the “woman” (a word repeated with a similar stress in the first stanza) does not. In any sublime geographic feature, there’s a hint of eternity, which is part of the attraction for human visitors, a hint that plays on the visitors a very slow joke, in that while rocks and sea may be lasting, any admirers, though they may feel like they have been placed above nature by virtue of their powers of perception, are not.

In his two-volume autobiography, written and then posthumously published under the not very convincing pretense that his second wife was the author of it, Hardy reprinted some of the notes he made in his journal when he first visited Beeny Cliff in March 1870 with Gifford.

March 10. Went with E. L. G. to Beeny Cliff. She on horseback. . . . On the cliff. . . . ‘The tender grace of a day,’ etc. The run down to the edge. The coming home.

The ellipses are Hardy’s. What a little shocked me, when an annotation to “Beeny Cliff” sent me to Hardy’s autobiography for a look at this journal entry, is the quoted fragment of poetry: “The tender grace of a day.” It comes from the conclusion of Tennyson’s poem “Break, break, break,” which is also about looking out over the sea while in mourning. The last two lines of that poem read as follows:

But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Tennyson wrote the poem while grieving for his young friend Arthur Hallam, who had died while abroad, and whose death became the subject of his later masterpiece, In Memoriam, which imaginatively follows the homeward progress by sea of Hallam’s sealed coffin. What’s puzzling is that while it makes a great deal of sense for “Break, break, break” to have been in Hardy’s mind in 1913, when he was composing “Beeny Cliff” as an elegy for Gifford, the poem seems to have been in his mind already in 1870, back when he was courting her. The stenographic style of the journal entry implies that when he was writing about the day, he was confident he would always remember its texture. “The run down to the edge. The coming home.” These were lyrical moments that he knew a brief prompt would always return him to, the way a short quoted phrase can call to mind the poem it has dropped out of. Did he and Gifford kiss when they came to the edge of the cliff? Did the sight of the waves crashing below bring the same Tennyson poem into both of their minds (“Break, break, break / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!”), and did one of them quote it to the other? Those details are not recoverable by us now, but the surprise is that the nether sky that Hardy saw in the sea that day, with Gifford by his side, was not a later invention, projected onto the past by a grieving husband. He saw it then, and so, probably, did she. “The tender grace of a day that is dead”: the young lovers wouldn’t have quoted that Tennyson line to each other unless they were already aware that they were living through a moment that was not going to return, aware that the beauty of their happiness together was not going to last as long as Beeny Cliff.