February 25, 2026 | | Media Digest: No Easy Manswers Paul McAdory reports from the masculinity in literature panel |
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| | STUDY HALL COURSES: | ▶ Intro To Movement Journalism | In this course, immigration reporter Tina Vásquez will discuss the origins of movement journalism, or journalism in service of liberation. We’ll learn about movement journalism’s history and its underpinnings. | Tina Vásquez is a movement journalist with more than 15 years of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, food, labor, and Latino culture. Currently, she is the features editor at the nonprofit newsroom Prism. She is also the Freedomways Reporting Fellowship coordinator for Press On, a Southern journalism collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation. Born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles, Tina currently calls North Carolina home. | The 1.5 hour course will take place on February 27th,10 AM PT/ 1 PM ET. Study Hall members use the coupon code “studyhallmember” to receive 50% off the standard price, bringing the price to $49.50 | Sign up. | | No Easy Manswers: At the Masculinity in Literature Panel | by Paul McAdory | Share on X, Share on Bluesky | | If you’re worried about young straight men’s place in literary production, or young white men’s, or young straight white American men’s; or if the question bedeviling you is why men don’t read, or read less than women but more than sometimes reported, or read performatively; or if, say, you want to know about the unspoken presupposition of cissexuality in discussions of dick-swaggering texts and the anxieties about measuring up that those texts express: there are essays and articles for you. There are enough of them, in fact, that some spend a paragraph or two commenting on the superabundance of pieces about men. Many are intellectually puny; a few are excellent. Leah Abrams’s “Into the Manosphere—in Manuscripts” is perhaps the definitive (and funniest) recent work on Men in Literature. In her essay, Abrams provides an overview of notable contributions to the bloated (or tumescent?!) corpus — Federico Perelmuter’s discourse-galvanizing “Against High Brodernism” and Charlie Markbreiter’s “Cis Male Literature” are, in my opinion, highlights — and then posits that the cancellation plot, body anxieties, and daddy issues are central to the output of several contemporary male authors. But if you’re curious who cares enough about the crisis (or crises, poly) supposedly plaguing literary manhood to go to a panel on the subject, you couldn’t do better than attending “The Trouble with Men” at the 92nd Street Y on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on a frigid night late last month. Roughly thirty percent of the seats were occupied by men, twenty percent by women, and fifty percent by the silent majority: no one. | “This seemed like such a good idea when we first thought of it,” the novelist and moderator Andrew Lipstein said moments after taking the stage. The problem, Lipstein had realized, is that “there’s really no one definition of” masculinity, the implication being, perhaps, that the conversation risked becoming diffuse and unenlightening. Of course, many author panels are diffuse and unenlightening. They’re often better for selling a few books and burnishing personal brands than theorizing about a broad, exhausted topic like “the state of masculinity in literature,” as the event’s webpage put it. To that point, none of the writing I mentioned above was discussed; there was no recapitulation of everything everyone has ever said about men and books. Instead of looking The Discourse in the eye, the four panelists, all male, seemed to be staring somewhere over its shoulder for much of the hourlong event. They spent a lot of time talking about war and vulnerability. If I didn’t learn much, I was at least intermittently entertained. | Onstage beside Lipstein were three other millennial male novelists: Daniel Lefferts, the author of Ways and Means (2024), about a gay man who, hoping to improve his and his mother’s lot, becomes entangled with a mysterious billionaire while pursuing a career in finance; Sean Thor Conroe, the writer behind the much-hyped, sometimes-celebrated bro-speak novel Fuccboi (2022); and Phil Klay, whose award-winning short story collection Redeployment (2014) and novel Missionaries (2020) deal with the effects of war on soldiers and noncombatants. Lipstein’s most recent effort, Something Rotten (2025), meanwhile, is a twisty page-turner that follows a cancelled, stay-at-home dad and his working journalist wife on a summer trip to visit family in Denmark. | Throat-clearing and introductions concluded, Lipstein began by asking the writers if masculinity was a narrowing lens through which to think about their work. Answering in the affirmative, Klay outlined the real-life inspiration for his story “Frago,” about a soldier’s “first encounter with the act of killing, with people getting seriously injured,” going on to say that “confronting and dealing with the possibility of death and violence has for a long time long been wrapped up with notions of manhood.” Conroe thought masculinity a limiting framework for understanding his novel and said, in a winding response in which he invoked Gilgamesh and Carl Jung, that the trouble with men is that “the forest” — basically, the psychic or physical space outside civilization where men confront their unconscious urges — has disappeared. “For a guy doing Postmates on his bike in Philly in the winter, it’s kind of like he has this conflict where there isn’t really that sense of being able to have that outlet,” he said. For his part, Lefferts said that masculinity is not a narrowing frame through which to consider his work, declaring that he was interested in it “as a performance among other types of performances.” | Lipstein went on to ask about the role of vulnerability in the texts, particularly Conroe’s, and queried Lefferts about whether being a provider, or wanting to be one, was a masculine trait. The conversation sometimes drifted from literature entirely, as when Klay, speaking about the various ways men prove their manhood—pounding brews, pounding bros—recalled winning his first boxing match, which he ended “with, like, a right cross.” “Doctor stopped the fight,” he said. “I was like, ‘I just punched someone into submission,’ and literally the first thought that came to my head was, ‘I am never chugging another beer for the rest of my life.’” My first thought after hearing this was, Men never stop trying to prove their manhood. | I admit that I had hoped the men would explain things to me about the construction of masculinity on the level of the sentence or paragraph. Someone might have cited Perelmuter’s essay, where he writes that Brodernist texts tend to contain “winding sentences, explicit references to entropy and math and classical music, metanarration, anti-realism, lonely and existential male protagonists…cringey and misogynistic sex scenes,” etc., or described prominent strategies for evoking masculinity in contemporary American literature. But, with few exceptions, the men limited themselves to speaking about content — about plot developments and character types — at the expense of form. | One of the audience questions, which Lipstein read from notecards passed to him by a worker, asked, “Do you think men are underrepresented in contemporary literature? Why or why not?” Klay didn’t answer directly but offered that books like Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022), in which a man’s supposed genius and achievement are revealed to be illusions, are “much more comfortable in modern literature” than works by an author like Cormac McCarthy, whose plots, about, e.g., post-apocalypse America and gangs of murderous cowboys, are as if “designed by a teenage boy.” McCarthy, Klay argued, “wholeheartedly believes in masculine virtues.” (Conroe, who does think men underrepresented, pushed back gently on this characterization of the author of Blood Meridian (1985).) Lefferts observed that "the man who’s sort of paralytically self-conscious about being a man" had taken center stage, a state of affairs that sometimes made him long for "a garden-variety asshole." If you’re looking for an asshole of this variety, you might try Paula Bomer’s The Stalker (2025), which he cited approvingly. | More interesting than the discussions of performances of masculinity in literature were the performances of the panelists themselves. Klay talked about his stint as a heavyweight boxer and his tenure as a public affairs officer with the US Marine Corps during the Iraq War; he told stories about how real war stories inspired his fictional war stories; he said “I like being a guy” and, a few seconds later, “Dudes rock, I’ve heard”; he put his elbows on his knees and gestured toward the audience; he seemed to want to be embody the older brother, or the cool uncle, or to impress upon the audience, which included seniors from the all-boys high school he attended and his former debate coach, that he was a workable masculine role model; he was manning up, out, or, in gay parlance, down. | In the early going especially, Conroe seemed to be quivering onstage, his voice trembling; he spoke about intellect and intuition, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the city and the forest, in convoluted paragraphs whose sentences tripped over themselves; he came off as a boyish man full of feelings about the subject of masculinity but incapable in the moment of clearly articulating his thoughts. He was moving, endearing, overcome, and self-conscious, asking Lipstein variations of “Did that make sense?” about his responses. Every time, Lipstein reassured him that they had. Lefferts, the lone gay onstage, played the poised, insightful jester. (Asked about the feminine quality he liked best in himself: “I have soft hands.”) “Growing up, masculinity was something to run away from,” he said early on, and his relative outsider status seemed to free him from the need to prove his manhood onstage while also sharpening his perspective on the matter at hand. | What was missing from the panel was combativeness, spirited disagreement, agony. If the state of masculinity in literature is a contentious issue, shouldn’t there have been some contentious moments? Civility reigned; everyone played nice. On the one hand, this is unsurprising: Who wants to come off as a dickhead at an event called “The Trouble with Men?” Then again, what better occasion? Perhaps what the panel needed was a woman’s touch, or a trans writer’s: the viewpoint of someone excluded or imperiled by traditional forms of masculinity. (“From the cis POV, trans men are, most typically, just not in the race,” Markbreiter wrote in his piece.) Trudging to the subway after the panel concluded, the once-viral question “Where are the women?” began to run on a loop through my head. | Then another sentence replaced it. The group of high school boys from the audience were walking ahead of me. Turning to his friends, one said, “I agree with the gay guy.” | | Press Freedom in Hong Kong | On the latest podcast episode, Liam Scott, a reporter at The Washington Post’s Press Freedom Desk, discussed the imprisonment of Hong Kong newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai. Scott contextualized this incident with Hong Kong’s broader attack on press freedom. | | | | ICYMI: | | | Plug Your Work | Please submit your work via our members site to share your work across our newsletters, blog, and social media channels. | Lola Rosario Reported On Land Grabs in Puerto Rico | For The Latino Newsletter, Lola Rosario reported on how "wealthy investors continue wealthy investors continue to displace locals - and destroy natural resources - in the vibrant coastal town of Loíza, Puerto Rico so they can build hotels and condominiums for wealthy non-Puerto Ricans." For the newsletter, she interviewed activists and residents. | Daniel Jarosak Reported on the Ukrainian Government's Trade Union Policies | For Lossi 36, Daniel Jarosak reported on "the situation of trade unions in Ukraine." Jarosak told Study Hall, "The piece examines the government's actions towards unions, how labor groups have responded, and what role society plays, and has played, in creating the current conditions of labor in Ukraine." | Taylor Crumpton Wrote An Analysis of Bad Bunny's Halftime Show | For TIME, Taylor Crumpton wrote an essay about Bad Bunny's halftime show. In the essay, Crumpton analyzes the performance from a Black feminist perspective and connects it to bell hooks and James Baldwin's "teachings about love." | Crumpton writes, "In the poetry of his performance, Bad Bunny showed that love is not domination. Love is not colonization." | Crumpton's writing has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, The Washington Post, and other outlets. | | | |
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