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“That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s soul,” Wilde wrote in his 1891 essay “The Critic as Artist.”

Yet Johnson, too, understood that criticism could never attain the “stability of a science” without some appeal to the universal laws written on the soul of every man. Indeed, criticism presented such an irresistible metaphor for rational-legal authority that many critics began to regard it as the herald of some political utopia—assuming, that is, that criticism could first prove itself.

For the critic may be witty or insightful or engaging or well-read or widely admired or a true virtuoso—but what she will never be is decidedly right.

Knowledge is what happens in the gap between what you want and wanting it.

This is the paradox of the coming-of-age story: growing up is always, at the same time, a regression. Only the immature mature, and even then, they don’t. That’s why adults do not, as every adult knows, exist.

to preempt the author’s inevitable claim that I myself had been “triggered.” I reproduce it here for posterity: So if it’s late at night, and you hear a noise in your building, do not be alarmed. It’s just Bret Easton Ellis again, stabbing your dog and raping your neighbors. Feel free to ignore him. Or if you must, just tell him what we say on Twitter: Go home, Bret. You’re drunk.

Like his hero Joan Didion, Ellis believes that style is everything; what a shame he has written a book with so little of it. (On Bret Easton Ellis)

They say we’re muscles, you and I. It’s not true; we’re mostly fat. We think we’re the ones pulling the strings, but if all it takes is a couple of strings, what’s the point of having a brain at all? No heart, no eyes, no little calculi, just five fingers, a song, and a dance.

He puts his index finger to his temple and twists it like a corkscrew. “You must know when you’re ready for the home,” he quips, as if talking to someone without a brain has made him question the integrity of his own.

“I got a bad throat,” Kermit tells Carson glumly, “I got a person in my throat.” That’s frog humor, Kermit clarifies over the audience’s laughter. Later Johnny ponders the experience: “It’s funny the way that the fantasy starts, and you get so caught up—I’m sitting here talking to a frog!”

he had a frenzy behind his eyes and a guitar behind his desk.

The truth is it’s always the brain, reading or writing. It’s always the brain talking or eating, having sex, not having sex, lying about why, apologizing for earlier, walking around the apartment wondering where did I leave that thing, saying how could you do this to me, asking is this really happening, asking what will I do without you. Brains softly crying together. Brains kissing brains goodbye.

It turns out I am the first woman after all.

I don’t want what you have; I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it. I would give anything to hate myself the way you do, assuming it’s different from the way I hate myself—which, who knows. The thing about vaginas is you can never get a good look at them.

Politics, too, can be a guilty pleasure. A political movement is no more tarnished by its finitude than a romance, or a childhood, or a good TV show. Maybe it will be a relief to remember that #MeToo accomplished what every guilty pleasure accomplishes: itself. Weigh us; find us wanting. Wanting could be enough. Desire isn’t revolution. But it might play one on TV.

Politics, too, can be a guilty pleasure. A political movement is no more tarnished by its finitude than a romance, or a childhood, or a good TV show. Maybe it will be a relief to remember that #MeToo accomplished what every guilty pleasure accomplishes: itself. Weigh us; find us wanting. Wanting could be enough. Desire isn’t revolution. But it might play one on TV.

Television is Westworld for people who can’t afford to leave their living rooms.

Believability is never about reproducing reality.

A political movement could be a form of entertainment; America had just learned this the hard way. Now justice was on prime time, and everyone was watching.

When Adorno complained that television was a “substitute for a social immediacy,” he had forgotten that every public is a fantasy, projected by rituals and shibboleths that if held up to the light just so will,

The other way to say this is that politics is often just a very special episode of belonging—and belonging is TV’s forte. Television was never just a box; it has always been primarily a social event.

“The dreamless dream,” Adorno called it, crowning it king of the culture industry. “The Timid Giant,” McLuhan called it, quoting from TV Guide.

The warm togetherness of the average American family gathered around a little box in their living room was a lie fabricated to keep people off the streets where politics might happen. Even Marshall McLuhan, no one’s idea of a Marxist, thought that television was too “cool,” too sensorially engrossing to drive political change.

“Television atrophies consciousness,” wrote Theodor Adorno. For him, television’s danger was its capacity for producing in viewers a feeling of social belonging that was in fact ideological cover for their increasing alienation under capitalism.

Sure, he hadn’t quite stuck the landing—but that could be forgiven, couldn’t it?

You want it because you want it. This is the zero-order disappointment that structures all desire and makes it possible. After all, if you could only want things you were guaranteed to get, you would never be able to want anything at all.

Now it dawns on you that your object will probably never give you what you want. But this is not what’s disappointing, not really. What’s disappointing is what happens next: nothing.

Call this the romance of disappointment. You want something. You have found an object that will give you what you want. This object is a person, or a politics, or an art form, or a blouse that fits. You attach yourself to this object, follow it around, carry it with you, watch it on TV. One day, you tell yourself, it will give you what you want. Then, one day, it doesn’t.

This would require understanding transness as a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants. The primary function of gender identity as a political concept—and, increasingly, a legal one—is to bracket, if not to totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender.

The latter is a privilege, by which I mean largely reflects its bearers’ material resources, connections, and luck, and only to a much lesser extent their talent. It can be argued, and has, that this privilege should be redistributed to members of historically marginalized groups;