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James McElroy

James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
Articles by James McElroy

Cargo Cults and the Disorganization of America

Social forms decay. This truism often elicits sweeping historical narratives that resurrect ancient names and obscure metaphysical disputes, while ignoring the most relevant social units—the organizations we interact with on a regular basis. Many of today’s most powerful organizations, from nonprofits to corporations, have been insulated from the immediate repercussions of decay by monetary policy, or the financialization of the economy. This results in the proliferation of unproductive organizations that look healthy from the outside. The first Boeing 737 MAX crash happened in October 2018, and no one mentioned it on the company’s Q4 earnings call…

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Heroic Anxiety in the Age of Social Media

There is a strange feedback loop between our institutions and the internet: the internet spreads mental illness like a plague and our institutions codify the latest psychosis. In pop culture, this dynamic created critical barista theory, in which the language of high criticism is used to articulate pop culture preferences. Critical barista theory…

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Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class

Something strange happened to the news over the past four years. The dominant stories all resembled the scripts of bad movies—sequels and reboots. The Kavanaugh hearings were a sequel to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and Russian collusion was rebooted as Ukrainian impeachment. Journalists are supposed to hunt for good scoops, but in January, as the…

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Literature as Flattery

In 1934, the Saturday Review of Literature published an ad on how to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. The ad is remarkable for its relationship to reading, democracy, and elitism. On the one hand, the ad dismisses critics who fret over the difficulty of the novel and presents it as a challenge that is rewarding to every…

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