In a world of opinion writers be an artist

A hot take on the hot take economy

Jul 16, 2026

With Sarah B. Spraggins in The Agony & Ecstasy of the Artist series.

FOR THE VAST MAJORITY of op-eds published, I would rather read the author’s grocery list. I skim my stack of subscription newsletters, as take after take glides past too smoothly, like lip gloss that will be wiped off in ten minutes.

On my bedside table right now, there is a thermometer, a plastic bottle half full of sparkling water, a lamp, some ibuprofen, and a yellow sticky note pad. I think a handful of objects found together in a room is more valuable to me and my writing than any theories about culture. We were once in middlebrow heaven, but social media has turned into a spider-web of theories, which is a kind of middlebrow hell.

No more great American novels. No more cowboys, hippies, and rockstars. Everywhere I scroll, the focus is on ideas, substanceless indicators, and positions. It is an understandable reaction, I suppose, to the sheer amount of data emerging, colliding, and bursting, slipping through the screen like slime. The current market gobbles up didactic material. From newspaper articles to novels, there seems to be fewer concrete accounts of what is happening in the world around us, and many attempts to explain it all from higher up.

THE POET MARIE HOWE asks her students to describe an object in detail without using any metaphors, as an exercise. She says it almost hurts them. My friend Mary, who happens to be a fiction writer, does this all the time without thinking, naming what she eats. “The pork belly with the plum!” she will say, while eating pork belly with diced plum mixed in.

“You look like a woman in a Slim Aarons photo,” Mary says, at least three times, while I am standing in a 60s-short, pool-blue, satin dress at her backyard wedding in Northern California. That weekend, several of my college friends put together that we have all developed a fear of flying on airplanes since we graduated. If I saw the headline for a New York Times or Washington Post op-ed, “Gen-Z reports higher rates of flight anxiety,” I wouldn’t click on it. The piece would be about decreased funding for the FAA or anxiety rates in general, rather than the fact of the matter itself, which is more interesting.

I taste the same sterile, metallic flavor in the reactionary internet-era novels as in The New York Times. These writers want to dirty things up compared to acceptable New Yorker realism, but even the grime is fake. I understand that these novels are attempting to capture the feeling of being alive in the age of the internet by describing a trad wife performing for her followers or an e-girl having an affair with her professor. But what they do is show the internet’s idea of what life is for people right now.

I KNOW A GUY who writes a magazine column famous enough to pay for a nice apartment. Lately, he’s been publishing on the declining birth rate and the state of romantic partnerships in the West, admonishing people younger than him to get married in their 20s. Meanwhile, he is middle-aged, single, and childless.

Based on the number of beautiful women orbiting him, this appears to be by choice. What is stopping him from getting married and having a baby himself? I think the virtues required to take one’s own advice—humility and boldness—are virtues writers should cultivate if they want to be able to resist the comfort of factory-farm ideas. They need them if they want to look out through their own two eyes and call things what they are.

I learned to call things what they are at twenty-four, after a romantic crisis spurred on by a three-date run with a guy, followed by a long, drawn-out, passive conversation, became a spiritual crisis. Lying flat on my bed, on the phone with my friend Laura, I told her that when I looked outside my window, it felt like I was on a spaceship, like there was nothing out there. But then I heard the voice of God say, “You have to make the world full.”

So I went into a monastic mode. I got rid of the internet and my entire social life. With my normal activities brought to a screeching halt, I became obsessed with one collection of George Orwell essays with a soviet red cover, titled “All Art is Propaganda.” They became a kind of lifeline as I rebuilt my connection to reality. The ending from the introduction by Keith Gessen pops into my mind at least once a week these days: “Look around you. Describe what you see as an ordinary observer—for you are one, you know—would see them. Take things seriously. And tell the truth. Tell the truth.”

Observational essays and poems alike are constructed intuitively, and only after the fact do they appear whole and fixed. On the other hand, most op-eds and philosophical arguments are formulaic from the start. They require a narrowing of the lens to only perceive what is relevant, or their argument will sprawl out of control.

The real world—which used to be all there was—is something that we now have to enter on purpose. World building is for everyone in 2026, not just fantasy fiction writers. A writer I admire says her pet peeve is not knowing where she is when she’s reading something: “I don’t want to wonder if I’m on the moon or in Las Vegas,” she says.

IT’S A HOT TAKE WORLD. You have to keep your guard up. Even some of the most independent-minded among us have been tempted towards the business of constant opinion generation—unwilling to look and name things as they are, and quick to spout off endless philosophical theories.

Washington, DC, where I live, is the theory capital of America. Opinions float in and out of my world like pollen. Even the physical layout—all that stone and grass—is like a college campus. There aren’t many new restaurants, just the same gloomy bars, but the people are interesting because they can’t be cool. I walk around a lot, “EMDR for the independent woman,” as Mary called it over text. I observe rooms of wonks and phonies and admire their traditions. I write about the clothes and hair of all the politicians’ wives, the British journalists, and the Hill staffers peacocking everywhere they go.

It is an act of faith to decide that the people and events swirling around me will be worth paying attention to in the end. In Dreaming By the Book, Elaine Scarry explains how poets use a simple description of the direction that the light is going to drive a poem forward. The journalistic equivalent is that wherever other people look, the reporter looks too, and that leads them somewhere unexpected.

I WORRY THAT DECADES in the future, people won’t be able to tell what it was like to be young in the 2020s, because of how little direct description went into the billions of words of writing we are producing about those years. I’ve started telling people I don’t have any opinions which means invite me to a party.

The writer Eve Babitz, who has been on my mind, was a master of description. I wouldn’t want to imitate her in all areas of life, but in art, she has been a kind of guide. Contemporary critics accuse her of being apolitical. I think her embodied openness is threatening to a certain kind of intellectual control. In profiles, she flirts with and uncovers in her subject—whether they be a dead rock star or a right-wing actor—some shard of insight no one else could have found. As a result of her atunement to the world, she is often surprised by what she finds inside it.

To allow herself to be surprised was to allow herself to change. This was an exposed position for her to be in, but it was what made her an artist.