interesting write up about agents, writers, and being obsessed with prestige, but as a counter point to what’s quoted below, this is from a job posting ICE has entitled “Deportation Officer” that asks for a bachelor degree or equivalent in experience. people will destroy people’s entire lives for $55k because they want to feel like they are tangibly doing the things they believe need to be done in the world, which is the same reason people “compromise” to publish with the Big 5: what they want from their literary fiction extends beyond its creation and encompasses being read, taken seriously, and even it changing things, whether that is a “political” change in society or an “aesthetic” change in the social world of Literature (their distinction). these are good things to want; i just wonder about how realistic it is that catering to that social world will deliver them

at any rate, in her essay about Jia Tolentino, Lauren Oyler said it well and with plenty of collateral damage: “That you can, as we say on the internet, just not occurs to Tolentino as a theoretical option but not an actual one.”