When will the swan begin to sing? We’re so weary of everything And the swan on the river goes glidin' by The swan on the river goes glidin' by —Bob Dylan, “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan”

The next great American novel is going to be written by someone the literary world would never take seriously, and that’s exactly why it will be a masterpiece. Nobody with a MFA from a fancy school, a book deal, an agent, a trust fund can write this era of America. It’s not possible. All they can do is stand outside and describe it with pretty words. It’ll come from somebody who lived the last 20 years of this country from inside its throat. They won’t have to describe anything because they’ve been breathing it, eating it, surviving it, and begging it for mercy. That’s the ONLY next great American novel worth reading. If it’s you, don’t stop.

I'd love to have some emerging writers sharing links & observations on culture, taste, new media, tech, etc. The newsletter has a particular vibe, see the archive here onethingnewsletter.substack.… email onethingnewsletter@gmail.com with a note if you're interested

a weird and exhausting period in our history

I just finished East of Eden this morning. I'm not religious at all but Steinbeck looked me in the eye and said: you are not destined to be your worst self; you are not condemned by your past; you get to choose, every single day, you get to choose. This book doesn't need you to believe in God (I judged it too harshly and quickly). It only needs you to believe in people...the terrifying, beautiful fact that we are capable of both darkness and light, and that the choice between them is always, stubbornly, ours. Honestly, one of the most devastating things I've ever read.

TFW you need advice on how to declutter but you can't find Marie Kondo's book in all the mess 😉

Monty Python’s @JohnCleese makes a point here that should be obvious, but somehow isn’t. Learning usually starts with the uncomfortable realization that you weren’t misled by villains or harmed by disagreement. You were just wrong.

Bangs out a new one every day 👏🏻

I have cleaned-up this fabulous Autochrome of the great actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) dressed as Cleopatra - a role she made her own back in the 1890s. Here she resurrects the character for the Lumiere brothers in 1907. The portrait was taken in colour 119 years ago and isn't colourised.

Delighted by Sir Paul McCartney doing a “We’re Number One” video in the year of our Lord 2026 and the room behind him is as messy as any teenager’s

Broke: pronouncing “biopic” like “myopic” Woke: pronouncing it like “water pik”

The unbearable oddness of dropping your most viral tweet in (checks year) 2026

Even knows when to use Comic Sans

Scream 7 (2026)

Memorial Day a day we have off from work to remember Except for me I never remember to take off from work

A key element of why we fall helplessly in love with any given artwork— simple or complex, comic or tragic, high or low— is our awareness of the inspiration, the effort, the risk, the sheer improbability involved in making it.

Weird how the two worst takes on the Colbert finale were from some Indianapolis stooge in USA Today and, er, the traditionally brilliant New Yorker

I have a guardian angel and it’s the love of the world

These look like AI renderings of New York in the 1960s

Mayor @ZohranKMamdani: It is time we stop asking our libraries to justify their existence. Earlier this week, we released our executive budget. Our budget baselines $31.7M in new, permanent funding across all 3 of New York's public library systems.

Curious: Do people generally believe that at some future date all social media posts will be reviewed for copyright violation, and the only people to go unscathed will be those who add a few words at the bottom of their post saying “I do not own this material”?