[{"id":275937,"date":"2026-08-26T05:10:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275937"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:51:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:51:05","slug":"what-anne-of-green-gables-reveals-about-white-girlhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-anne-of-green-gables-reveals-about-white-girlhood\/","title":{"rendered":"What Anne of Green Gables<\/em> Reveals About White Girlhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow dare you!<\/i>\u201d Anne Shirley seethes. Anne stands in her one-room country schoolhouse wearing a gingham dress. She grips in her girlish hands the pale wooden frame of her writing slate\u2014or rather, what remains of it. The rest of her slate has flown in pieces around the school room. Anne Shirley has smashed her slate over Gilbert Blythe\u2019s head.<\/p>\n

Anne Shirley is the heroine of L.M. Montgomery\u2019s 1908 novel, Anne of Green Gables<\/i>. Gilbert Blythe is her enemy. He has taunted her beyond what any eleven-year-old girl should have to endure. He has pulled her long braid\u2014but that\u2019s not all he has done. Gilbert has lifted Anne\u2019s braid, holding its red length up for the students around them to ridicule, and hissed the mocking word: carrots!<\/i><\/p>\n

Anne of Green Gables<\/i> is one of the most enduringly popular Anglo-American girlhood novels. Never out of print, continually adapted to stage and screen, in the 1980s Anne<\/i> was enjoying a surge in popularity unprecedented even in its own successful history. Across every retelling, every book cover, Anne\u2019s red hair remains central to the story\u2019s drama. The famous \u201cslate-over-the-head episode,\u201d as Margaret Atwood once described it, anchors every adaptation. In it, Anne Shirley displays the full-throttle girlish passion so many of us love her for. She has acted out. But for us readers, for viewers, she has acted rightly.<\/p>\n

When Anne brings down her slate, full force, on Gilbert Blythe\u2019s head, the students in the schoolhouse gasp. Her teacher punishes her. Even she feels a little shocked. But she is not sorry. Righteous anger fuels her. \u201cHow dare you call me carrots!\u201d And truly, how dare he? Even if he didn\u2019t really mean it or understand the full scope of what he had done. What worse insult could you hurl at a sensitive, story-loving girl than to say: You have the wrong hair<\/i>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

America loves the past. For all our sense of ourselves as forward looking, uniquely modern, and ahead of all the rest, we remain nostalgic for our origins. Our \u201ccity on a hill\u201d sense of our own exceptionalism emerges from \u201cour\u201d national story, one about our foundations in freedom, godliness, liberty and justice for all. We fought a war of revolution. We bravely set out into the wilderness. We fought for freedom again and again.<\/p>\n

Girls often want power, the power granted to them by the myths of America\u2019s happy story. Also, they resent that power\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n

Our history, it\u2019s implied, inaugurates the best version of our future. We narrate the transition between our American past and our coming American destiny all the time. We tell the story over and over as<\/i> a story. We want to get back to greatness, again. \u201cIn no other country on earth,\u201d said a campaigning Barack Obama, \u201cis my story even possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my girlhood, I learned to love the past in a very particular way: by devouring classic novels of white, anglophone girlhood. I liked novels about the past, and I especially liked novels and stories from<\/i> the past. I liked how these stories connected my American girlhood to a long history of American girls. The books made my life feel important. Books like Anne<\/i> took part in an overarching cultural project by which, as Toni Morrison would later write about her own novel The Bluest Eye<\/em>, a whole idea of a culture \u201ccould take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female.\u201d These novels told me that, much like the past, I was lovable. In fact, one lesson of these novels seemed to be that American girls were loveable in much the same way that America\u2019s past was\u2014as an ideal. (The problem is that, as the books themselves sometimes seemed to know, ideals are always different from reality.)<\/p>\n

Sometimes the historic girl novels I loved traveled outside of the US itself. They took place in British great houses, or other reaches of the British empire, like India. Anne of Green Gables<\/i>, famously, is Canadian, and it may seem strange to include it in a catalog of novels specifically for American girls. But Anne<\/i>, in fact, was published in Boston\u2014its setting is Canadian, but its publication and marketing history are entirely American. No Canadian press published the book until the 1980s. The global scope of this novelistic narrative reach only made my sense of my American girlhood more powerful. The books\u2019 capacious geography felt like a girlish form of manifest destiny. And indeed, girls\u2019 fiction was literally a part of the US imperial project. (In the aftermath of WWII, US State Department libraries in Japan distributed translated girls\u2019 fiction like Anne<\/i> as a part of a cultural reeducation project.) America was the best version of a vast and astonishing project, these books conveyed. American girls, these stories made it seem, were the best of all possible girls.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the problem with America\u2019s past: Despite how much Americans seem to love it, when you look at it squarely, it\u2019s a mess. Anytime you try to pluck out a heroic act of liberty and justice to admire, you\u2019re likely to find a hydra-headed tangle of cruelty, displacement, selfishness, violence. Much like whiteness itself, America can only admire its virtues by strategically omitting most of its own history. It\u2019s thorny and uncomfortable, and it\u2019s been a problem for white Americans since our founding moment.<\/p>\n

For nearly that whole time, popular fictions have been trying to make American history more palatable. Girlhood fictions, for reasons I\u2019ll explain, perform that flavor-enhancing role in particularly powerful ways. Because girls are believed to be delicate and vulnerable, virtuous and admirable \u201csweethearts\u201d even when also strong willed and unruly, stories about girls can, by a kind of narrative moral alchemy, make the places they are from seem as though they have those qualities too. Just like a winning gymnast could amplify a nation\u2019s victories, an impassioned girl character could also smooth over a nation\u2019s violence. Synecdochically connecting girls to country could make a country\u2019s mistakes seem like admirable unruliness too.<\/p>\n

American girls\u2014at least, some<\/i> American girls\u2014can find a tremendous kind of power by reflecting back to America a flattering version of itself. But as Mary Lou Retton shows, that power comes at a cost. This flattering version is not true; it\u2019s not real. And to become its emblem, you have to try and make yourself into a less true, less complicated, less honest version of yourself. This, too, feels thorny, uncomfortable, bad. Girls often want power, the power granted to them by the myths of America\u2019s happy story. Also, they resent that power\u2019s demands. They are conflicted. I was conflicted.<\/p>\n

And my theory is: This inner conflict finds a symbol in the many girlish fictional heroines who have\u2014who hate having, yet whom we love for having\u2014the wrong hair.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I was very beautiful and had nut-brown hair,\u201d asks Anne, \u201cwould you want me?\u201d These are some of Anne\u2019s early words in Anne of Green Gables<\/i>. She has just learned that the people she believed had adopted her\u2014a lonely, aging brother and sister\u2014 do not want her after all. Anne\u2019s arrival at Green Gables is a mistake. Maybe the problem is her lack of beauty. Maybe the problem is her hair.<\/p>\n

The aging brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, quickly dismiss Anne\u2019s sense that the problem involves hair or beauty. They wanted a boy. They need help on the farm. Marilla, especially, feels determined to send Anne back. \u201cI don\u2019t want an orphan girl,\u201d she tells Matthew, \u201cand if I did, she isn\u2019t the style I\u2019d pick out.\u201d Marilla does not specify what \u201cstyle\u201d she would like. Anne, loquacious and emotional, seems not to be it.<\/p>\n

Anne\u2019s surprise arrival at Green Gables happens in the novel\u2019s second chapter. You might expect that the question of whether Anne might stay at Green Gables would create an organizing tension for the novel\u2019s plot, give its story a shape. But in fact, the Cuthberts adopt Anne in fairly short order. The remaining story has very little \u201cplot,\u201d if you compare it to other orphan novels like Harry Potter<\/i> or The Wizard of Oz<\/i>. There\u2019s no villain or dramatic conflict driving a conflict forward. There\u2019s just\u2014\u201cjust\u201d\u2014the picaresque pleasures of reading about Anne\u2019s adventures as she adapts to her new home. Another way to put this is that the pleasure of Anne<\/i>\u2014and L. M. Montgomery\u2019s true literary genius, across her oeuvre\u2014comes from finding significant and dramatic the subtle machinations of acceptance and judgment that make up most girls\u2019 lives, every day.<\/p>\n

Adapting to her new home, for Anne, is hard. Is it hard because of her hair? Despite the Cuthberts\u2019 eye-rolling, the book itself seems uncertain. \u201cPeople who haven\u2019t red hair don\u2019t know what trouble is,\u201d Anne explains. Anne is sweet-spirited and loving and tries to be good, but she\u2019s also hot-tempered and drama prone. It\u2019s not just the slate. She \u201cflies\u201d in a rage at a neighbor who calls her ugly and redheaded. She accidentally gets her best friend drunk. She buys hair dye from a peddler that turns her hair green (she was aiming for black but got the symbolic color of her envy instead). She also saves a dying child from the croup, falls off a roof, and almost drowns in a pond.<\/p>\n

No one in her small town has ever met anyone like her. The question of the novel is: How will living in her new home change her? What will it take for someone as impetuous as Anne to fit in? \u201cHer temper matches her hair I guess,\u201d says the insulted neighbor. The red of her hair is the visible sign of her fiery, unregulated nature. If her hair can\u2019t change, can she?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

My personal first encounter with Anne of Green Gables<\/i> came in 1983. I had gotten a hardcover copy of the book for Christmas. I have a visceral memory of my Aunt Nancy reading the first pages to me. We were sitting in my parents\u2019 bed, on the white-and-green-leafed sheets my mother I\u2019m sure had picked out. The book was large, with a picture of redheaded Anne holding her flower-bedecked hat onto her head and gazing into the distance. Aunt Nancy\u2019s voice was quiet and even as she read the opening pages about the Green Gables creek and the watchful eye of Mrs. Rachel Lynde. My mother and my aunt were with me as I turned toward the past that, through stories, we felt we all shared.<\/p>\n

But my particular hardcover edition, I did not then know, wasn\u2019t one that any other woman in my family could have held. In 1983, the Anne of Green Gables<\/i> copyright had just entered the public domain. Publishers around the world jumped at the chance to reap the benefits of the novel\u2019s long-standing popularity. Editions exploded. Between 1908 and 1983, the original publisher reissued the novel 30 times; between 1983 and 2009, 781 new editions would appear. One of these was my own beloved hardcover, one of the most precious objects I ever owned.<\/p>\n

For all the conservative positioning of Anne as a rebuttal to more urban, racially diverse, multicultural programming…Anne had more significance than this neat divide between contemporary culture and conservative history.<\/p>\n

Anne was everywhere, and she wasn\u2019t alone. My edition of Anne of Green Gables<\/i> was part of a renewed and intense 1980s uptick in stories about historic anglophone girls. All of L.M. Montgomery\u2019s novels were reissued: the Emily of New Moon<\/i> series, the Story Girl, Jane of Lantern Hill<\/i>. As publication of girlhood books surged, the books\u2019 stories moved into other media. In the late 1970s and 1980s, mass-media productions of girlhood novels were everywhere. Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s Little House<\/i> books were on TV from 1974 to 1983. Francis Hodgson Burnett\u2019s The Secret Garden<\/i> was made into a movie twice (1987, 1993) and also a Broadway musical (1991; my Grammy bought me the CD). In 1990, Disney and the Canadian Broadcasting Company collaborated on a Story Girl<\/i> television show. In 1986, a woman named Pleasant Rowland (her name is really Pleasant Rowland) began her extremely successful efforts to mass-produce the historical novel experience, starting her line of American Girl dolls and their companion books after, as she puts it, \u201can inspirational trip to Colonial Williamsburg.\u201d The 1994 movie of Louisa May Alcott\u2019s Little Women<\/i> starred ur-\u201990s girl emblem Winona Ryder, showing that even the edgy among us harbored an inner love for the pinafore.<\/p>\n

I read all these stories, and I watched all these shows. I like to think I would have loved these novels\u2014and I do love them, more than almost any other books I have ever read\u2014even if they had never been adapted for screen. But it\u2019s undeniable that the media spectacle intensified their attraction. Every girl I knew, not only the bookish ones, understood themselves through these stories. Most white women my age will still sort ourselves into types around our favorites. Some (me) love Anne best, some Emily, some Laura, some Jo. Regardless, we were all old-fashioned girls.<\/p>\n

But even for girls with other favorites, Anne of Green Gables<\/i> became a 1980s event. In 1985, the director Kevin Sullivan produced, with primary funding from the Canadian Broadcasting Company and support from PBS, a record-shattering Anne<\/i> miniseries. Its enormous success and rave reviews meant that, as a 2013 Vulture<\/em> article would claim, \u201cfor girls growing up in the \u201980s, Anne of Green Gables<\/i> was seminal TV viewing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true. Anne was for girls. But importantly, it wasn\u2019t just for girls. It was also for everyone who cared about girls or wanted to think about them. Critics hoping to draw large audiences to the Anne<\/i> television spectacle emphasized its universality. It\u2019s \u201c[o]ne of those rare television efforts,\u201d said the Chicago Tribune<\/i>, that \u201cserves up, for the youngsters, both rebelliousness and silliness, and\u2014for the adults\u2014bite, wit, irony and just plain joy.\u201d Jay Rayvid, director of PBS, made an even more expansive claim in the Montreal Gazette<\/i>: \u201cWhat Kevin has managed is what Lucy Maud Montgomery did with the novel.\u201d \u201cHe has created a universal story based in Canada, in an era that holds a great deal of nostalgia for all the western world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rayvid\u2019s words capture the slippery history I described above: Anne<\/i> is about a girl in Canada, he concedes, but it is really about all girls, and in fact, all of us\u2014all American PBS watchers, and everyone, everywhere. I\u2019m not surprised that Rayvid, facing the threat of tremendous budget cuts to PBS under Reagan\u2019s austerity budget, advocated for his programming under exactly these terms: the \u201cuniversal\u201d appeal of Anne\u2019s \u201cera.\u201d America loves the past! In the 1980s, it loved this sunny Reaganite nostalgia\u2014much like, now, it loves an angrier MAGA version. To a budget-cutting president, Rayvid offered a story that was simultaneously about \u201call the western world\u201d and, specifically, a young, white girl.<\/p>\n

I, too, find it extremely pleasurable to consider Anne\u2019s turn-of-the-century era in the way Rayvid described it: as a time full of \u201cjust plain joy.\u201d It\u2019s pleasurable for me even though I know that claim isn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t mean a little bit not true: It\u2019s not true at all<\/i>. The 1890s, Anne\u2019s moment, saw, for example, the instantiation of US legal segregation (in the Plessy v. Ferguson<\/i> decision) and the extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was an era of surging extralegal violence against immigrants and racial minorities, amply documented by Ida B. Wells, among others. But PBS didn\u2019t argue for its worth by broadcasting any of Wells\u2019s accounts of Southern Horrors<\/i>\u2014lynchings, mob rule. Instead, it focused on Anne, a novel about a well-meaning orphan. Doing so, PBS could make telling a sanitized history feel pleasurable and virtuous. How could it be wrong to tell a story of an orphan girl\u2019s struggle to find love? Isn\u2019t a child\u2019s struggle to feel accepted a genuinely universal one, even as it\u2019s also protected and niche?<\/p>\n

This sanitized history had the added benefit of appealing to many viewers who felt, as critics have throughout American history, that the 1980s present was degraded compared to the idealized past. Take for instance one punchy critic in a Long Island newspaper, who claimed that \u201cthe story of brave little Anne Shirley\u201d is \u201ca splendid antidote\u201d to \u201cthe songs of Madonna and films about getting high in high school.\u201d<\/p>\n

The songs of Madonna! Here this critic snaps our focus away from Anne\u2019s<\/i> \u201ctimeless\u201d appeal to its specific appeal in the 1980s\u2014a moment when government resources were on the line, and a debate was raging about women and what role they might play. The famous television version of Anne of Green Gables<\/i> was being produced just as Madonna was on her enormously successful concert tour promoting Like a Virgin.<\/i> Americans in the 1980s loved both these unruly women. What can we say about their overlap? Is there any connection to make between Anne, smashing her slate, and Madonna, \u201ctouched for the very first time\u201d?<\/p>\n

One interpretation might be that Anne and Madonna are opposites. It\u2019s not hard to see Anne<\/i> as a part of a conservative backlash to, or rebuttal of, other \u201980s media. Set against cultural products like Madonna\u2019s albums, art that was economically and sexually frank and that openly emerged from New York\u2019s diverse downtown scenes, Anne<\/i> offered a literally whitewashed (there is, in the books, whitewashing) version of a sweet, clean, anglophone historic ideal.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that Anne was often positioned in just this way: the innocent opposite of more contemporary, complex, urban stories. Sullivan\u2019s Anne<\/i> first aired on PBS the very same night, for instance, that the erotic multicultural dance fable Flashdance<\/em> was first shown on network TV. Anne<\/i> won the 1986 Emmy for children\u2019s programming over another show about an orphan girl with iconic hair: (the more Madonna aligned?) Punky Brewster.<\/p>\n

But for all the conservative positioning of Anne as a rebuttal to more urban, racially diverse, multicultural programming\u2014and for all the real danger in Sullivan\u2019s historic erasures\u2014Anne had more significance than this neat divide between contemporary culture and conservative history. Conservative pundits may have wanted Anne to be a model orphan, but that desire just threw her unruliness into sharper relief.<\/p>\n

For me, the gap between Anne and Madonna (or Punky) was not so extreme as it may seem from the outside. I loved all three. All of them, in different ways, expressed something confusing that I myself felt: a desire to be admired and desired, alongside a sense that the admiration on offer was rigid, judgmental, and unfair. Anne\u2019s old-fashionedness may have made her seem, to the casual viewer, more conservative than Punky. But Punky, for all her pigtailed, torn-jeans contemporaneity, never did anything so passionate as to smash a slate. She never showed the friction that came from being the emblem of a falsely \u201cjoyful\u201d history. Punky endured difficulties, but she was never anything but adorable. Nobody who mattered ever told her she had the wrong hair.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity<\/a> by Sarah Mesle. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow dare you!\u201d Anne Shirley seethes. Anne stands in her one-room country schoolhouse wearing a gingham dress. She grips in her girlish hands the pale wooden frame of her writing slate\u2014or rather, what remains of it. The rest of her<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25694,"featured_media":275956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43093,43101,43092,43095],"tags":[21137,17789,12501,21135,4192,105868,111875,10278],"class_list":["post-275937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-film-and-tv","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-anne-of-green-gables","tag-beacon-press","tag-cultural-history","tag-girlhood","tag-hair","tag-sarah-mesle","tag-tangled-seven-iconic-moments-in-white-womens-hair-and-what-they-tell-us-about-power-pleasure-and-complicity","tag-whiteness","story-type-girlhood"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19MB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/anne-of-green-gables.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25694"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275883,"date":"2026-08-26T05:09:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275883"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:46:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:46:00","slug":"how-american-bureaucracy-literally-steals-years-from-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-american-bureaucracy-literally-steals-years-from-your-life\/","title":{"rendered":"How American Bureaucracy (Literally) Steals Years From Your Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver\u2019s licenses, and applying for government loans. At prevailing wages, this uncompensated labor is worth $430 billion a year. If Washington were to create a Department of Bureaucracy to take on the paperwork it shunts to citizens, the agency would require 5.9 million employees, making it four times the size of the active-duty military. The DOB\u2019s payroll would be larger than that of every other federal department combined.<\/p>\n

The nation\u2019s paperwork regime frustrates every resident, and particularly lower-income residents who use more government programs and interact more frequently with public officials. The political scientist Elizabeth Cohen has done seminal work exploring time as a potent, if obscure, form of political currency. \u201cThe devaluation of a person or group\u2019s political time is a structural obstacle to equality,\u201d she writes. Yet we can\u2019t measure time and effort as easily as we measure dollars, and we don\u2019t even try. The 12-billion-hour estimate is an undercount, and an egregious one.<\/p>\n

Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, two of the foremost scholars of American public administration, have identified three key types of administrative costs the government imposes on citizens. First are learning or research costs. People need to figure out what is out there, from emergency shelters to passport agencies. They need to determine what they qualify for and how to apply. The United States has no measure of\u2014and little appreciation for\u2014the research costs it imposes. The government doesn\u2019t do a lot of outreach. It doesn\u2019t centralize information, create cross-enrollment pathways, or distribute benefits automatically. Politicians focus intently on whether something exists<\/i>, not whether it is accessible.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t measure time and effort as easily as we measure dollars, and we don\u2019t even try.<\/p>\n

Policy changes create research costs too. Consider how American families have negotiated the end of Roe v. Wade<\/i>. In a shock decision in 2022, the Supreme Court revoked the Constitutional right to an abortion and allowed states to ban the procedure. Old local statutes enjoined by Roe <\/i>went into sudden effect. (Wisconsin began observing a criminal abortion law passed in 1849.) Red-state legislatures rushed to pass stringent prohibitions.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s jurists and lawmakers did not just make abortion illegal. They brewed up a climate of intense uncertainty, increasing learning costs exponentially. Women needed to figure out whether they lived in a state with a total ban, a ban after a certain number of weeks of pregnancy, or a \u201cheartbeat\u201d ban. Hospitals needed to figure out if their workers could provide an abortion to a minor or to a victim of rape or incest. Physicians needed to decide what to do if a pregnant woman came to the ER suffering from organ failure, or carrying a fetus with a fatal abnormality.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat actually counts as the life of the mother?\u201d Jennifer Jury McIntosh, an obstetrician and spokesperson for the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, asked me. \u201cIs that her life today? Is that her life during this pregnancy? How close to losing her life does she have to be for us to decide to terminate? That feels really weighty, because my interpretation of what I feel is lifesaving\u2014does that align with a particular prosecutor\u2019s interpretation?\u201d She feared situations in which not ending a patient\u2019s pregnancy might constitute medical malpractice, but doing so might open a provider up to criminal prosecution. Her fears were fast borne out. In 2023, an Oklahoma woman with a cancerous molar pregnancy was asked to wait, decompensating, in a hospital parking lot until doctors decided that she was sick enough to receive a termination.<\/p>\n

Next there are compliance costs, \u201cthe time and effort spent on the often tedious task of filling out forms, documenting status, or responding to bureaucratic directives,\u201d as Moynihan and Herd put it. These are the most obvious and easiest to understand time taxes. And Uncle Sam keeps but a chimeric tally of them.<\/p>\n

The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 obligates Washington to measure and reduce regulatory burdens. Rules applying to businesses have to provide a net social good, as proven through rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Uncle Sam weighs the value of clean air against the value of gas to commuters. He scores the hassle of Department of Labor safety-equipment mandates against the hassle of lost limbs. But for regulations to even get a cost-benefit test, they need to have an annual cost estimated at $200 million or more, or \u201cadversely affect in a material way\u201d jobs, productivity, competition, public health, or the government itself. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, doesn\u2019t require that agencies perform cost-benefit analyses of regulations imposed on individuals. Making a company spend $300 million on fire-retardant materials counts. Making someone miserable with a forty-one-page application does not.<\/p>\n

OIRA does produce an estimate of how long it takes the average person to finish a given government form: eight hours for the IRS\u2019s Form 1040, for instance. These estimates are often unreliable. \u201cOIRA sometimes does field studies, where they observe actual live humans collecting information, keeping records, that type of thing,\u201d a longtime OIRA staffer told me. \u201cBut sometimes, the numbers just fall out of the sky and you have no idea where they came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plus, OIRA only counts the time people spend doing federal paperwork, not forms put out by states or municipalities. Imagine being a mother in Louisiana struggling to pay your bills. You decide to apply for SNAP, better known as food stamps. You receive an 8,350-word application. Page one instructs you to distinguish between SNAP and two other programs, the Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program and the Kinship Care Subsidy Program; a schematic lets you know what to fill out, depending on what you think you qualify for and what you want to try to enroll in. Page three instructs you to collect paperwork or data in up to thirteen different categories: pharmacy printouts from the past three months, four pay stubs, baptismal certificates, proof of who lives in your home. Page six includes details on drug court and \u201calternatives to abortion\u201d; page seven outlines the penalties if you spend your benefits on a cruise ship or at a psychic. Page fifteen asks you to recount your income from twenty-four different sources; page sixteen asks about fourteen different housing expenses; page nineteen asks about ten types of assets members of your family might own.<\/p>\n

The government does not account for compliance burdens that do not involve forms. Yet these burdens can be extreme. To qualify for disability insurance, a person needs to go to a doctor, explain their health condition, get a diagnosis, have the physician fill out a form, fill out some forms themselves, take the documents to a Social Security office, and apply. Many also need to litigate their disability with a special judge. This time does not count, in a literal sense. Nobody is counting it.<\/p>\n

We do have some ways to measure the compliance burdens, however. Some programs keep a count of \u201cprocedural denials\u201d: the number and share of applicants refused a benefit because they did not or could not get the paperwork done right. In Louisiana, one in four SNAP recipients \u201cchurns\u201d on and off the program every year due to bureaucratic troubles. The state closes 15 percent of welfare cases annually for procedural reasons. In 2018, it disenrolled 15,689 children\u2014children!\u2014from its public health insurance program due to \u201cfailure to comply.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work of the political scientist Carolyn Barnes explores a third type of cost: redemption costs, or the time and effort it takes to use a benefit or exercise a right. Medicare imposes very light costs. Seniors go to a provider, hand their insurance card over at the front desk, and get the care they need. Other initiatives are impossibly fussy. Women fleeing domestic violence cannot find a landlord who will accept their emergency housing voucher. Hurricane survivors cannot find hotels participating in the Transitional Shelter Assistance program. Parents on WIC, a nutrition program for women, infants, and children, have to sort out which cartons of eggs and types of grapes they can buy at the grocery store. \u201cIf you pick a different grocery store, you can\u2019t find the brand, you get the wrong brand, you get the wrong size, you\u2019ve got to be doing math,\u201d one mother told Barnes.<\/p>\n

Finally, there are psychological costs. Difficult interactions with the government intensify the sickness of sickness and the trauma of trauma. They make a person feel worse about themselves and this country. They change a person\u2019s politics and alter their sense of civic responsibility. The government does not track the emotional burden of waiting for your spouse to join you in this country, struggling to get help as a teenage parent, pleading for medical care for a dying family member from an insurer, or waiting in a polling line in a state that used to consider your ancestors property. Thus, it is hard to believe that Uncle Sam really cares. As the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written, \u201cWhat cannot be numbered remains vague and unbounded, evading human grasp.\u201d As McKinsey consultants like to put it, you cannot manage what you cannot measure.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

While Washington bungles its way through the task of public administration, Silicon Valley has devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to making transactions effortless. With a few swipes of my thumb, I can call up any media imaginable in seconds, summon a black car to my doorstep in minutes, have a meal prepared and dropped off within an hour, and buy a closet\u2019s worth of clothes for overnight delivery. In contrast, I have spent hours nursing a migraine while figuring out my taxes. And I have spent countless days as a reporter watching people struggle to navigate Medicaid, the construction-permit system, veteran\u2019s benefits, the farm-loan program, and SNAP.<\/p>\n

The situation is not as simple as \u201cbusiness good, government bad\u201d or \u201cbusiness elegant, government clunky.\u201d Companies use fine print to their own ends. They create a frictionless experience for people looking to spend, and a frictional experience for people looking to quit spending. They make purchases easy and instantaneous, and cancellations difficult and slow. They underscore that administrative burdens are a flexible, powerful tool.<\/p>\n

Not long ago I tried to get out of a gym membership. The manager asked me to send in a doctor\u2019s note, or rental or mortgage paperwork demonstrating that I had moved. (I objected; she relented.) I noticed that I had signed up for several \u201cfree trials\u201d I had forgotten to cancel, meaning that I was spending $40 a month on apps I did not want. Months earlier, my family had stayed in an Airbnb-type rental without a locking front door. I had to dig up the city\u2019s tenancy code and research acceptable-housing rules to get the owner to give us our money back.<\/p>\n

In each case, I was purchasing a service, not a tangible good. I was entering into a contract, instead of taking ownership of an object. Thus, I was encountering a central conduit for the bureaucratization of modern life and an incubator for modern time taxes. We have become a nation of subscribers and sublessees and members, with simple transactions becoming extended, legalized affairs. As of 2018, the country had 826,537,000 consumer-arbitration agreements in force\u2014a significant undercount, the academics who performed the study noted. Another paper found that 99 percent of consumers did not read the contracts they signed, thus handing over \u201ctheir constitutional rights lock, stock, and barrel,\u201d as Shennan Kavanagh of the National Consumer Law Center put it.<\/p>\n

We have become a nation of debtors and policyholders, working with intermediaries and guarantors as well as with sellers and the thousands of firms providing homeowner\u2019s insurance, auto insurance, health insurance, title insurance, mortgages, credit scores, and loans. Signature boxes and document portals have become costs of and barriers to transport, shelter, and medical care.<\/p>\n

We have become a nation of credentials. The share of jobs requiring a postsecondary education has climbed to 68 percent, up from one quarter half a century ago. The share of jobs demanding an occupational license has climbed to 22 percent, up from 5 percent in the 1950s. In many cases, such certificates are unnecessary. Washington, DC, recently passed a rule requiring that day care teachers obtain a two-year associate\u2019s degree, though there\u2019s no evidence that day care teachers need <\/i>a two-year associate\u2019s degree to do their jobs successfully. \u201cEven though I have a lot of experiential learning, I don\u2019t meet what is now the current standard,\u201d one veteran teacher explained.<\/p>\n

We have become a nation of middle managers, with companies and nonprofits adding millions of employees to monitor compliance, track performance, design training modules, and administer benefits. Between 1987 and 2012, colleges and universities added eighty-seven professional staffers every working day, pushing up the ratio of administrators to academics and down the ratio of students to staff members. The trend is the same across nonprofits, for-profits, and public offices. One in six workers exists to push paperwork around for other workers. This kudzu costs the country $3 trillion a year, the business consultants Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini have estimated.<\/p>\n

Administrative procedures might be a necessary tool of sound government. But administrative burdens <\/i>are a technology of annoyance, degradation, discrimination, and needless extraction.<\/p>\n

We might live in a world of frictionless consumption. Yet we also live in a world of \u201ctotal bureaucratization,\u201d a term coined by the anthropologist David Graeber. We deal with more forms and longer forms, more subscriptions and rebates and reimbursements and applications and enrollment periods. We are tasked with bureaucratic work by institutions public and private. Indeed, our public institutions encourage <\/i>the promulgation of private paperwork. The government \u201cprovides the legal framework,\u201d Graeber argues, as well as \u201call of the elaborate mechanisms of enforcement.\u201d Uncle Sam allows insurers to deny necessary procedures to their beneficiaries. He allows companies to foist forced-arbitration agreements and extortionate contract terms on unsuspecting consumers. The government shuffles citizens into private contracts too. Instead of offering a sufficient number of public housing units, it offers an unlimited number of guaranteed mortgages. Instead of opening community colleges, it expands its student loan portfolio.<\/p>\n

Citizens are fed up. Just 36 percent of Americans describe the government\u2019s processes as \u201cintuitive.\u201d Only 41 percent agree that they are \u201cclear\u201d and \u201cunderstandable.\u201d More than half find it frustrating to access or use public services. A large majority believe that the government is incompetent, given the amount of work they do on its behalf. A majority of voters in both parties want Uncle Sam to deliver them from life\u2019s daily, unnecessary annoyances.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The German sociologist Max Weber described the ideal bureaucracy as hierarchical, disciplined, rules-driven, professional, impersonal, and meritocratic. It should protect citizens from partisan vengeance. It should apply general rules to specific cases, ensuring that policy outcomes are predictable and just.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s public servants are disciplined, rules-driven, and professional. Yet the outcomes they generate can be wildly unpredictable and at times extremely unfair. Low-income mothers in Vermont are eighteen times more likely to receive welfare than low-income mothers in Mississippi. Austin approves nearly thirty times as many building permits as Providence, adjusting for population size. And, of course, many successful applicants for welfare benefits or building permits spend hours and hours struggling with red tape.<\/p>\n

Administrative procedures might be a necessary tool of sound government. But administrative burdens <\/i>are a technology of annoyance, degradation, discrimination, and needless extraction. They are a subtle way that the government achieves certain policy outcomes, including shrinking the size of the safety net, discouraging outgroups from voting, preventing construction, and motivating the sick and the poor to work.<\/p>\n

In the past decade, Washington has started to wake up to this ongoing catastrophe. Academic interest in the time tax has exploded, with Moynihan, Herd, Barnes, and other professors examining its cancerous effect on American life. Public servants have become cognizant of the disaster they have wrought too. The Obama official Cass Sunstein begins his book Sludge <\/i>by confessing that he failed as the head of OIRA. He focused on \u201clarge and dramatic issues,\u201d such as healthcare reform, rather than the granular and overlooked issue of enrollment processes and fine print. Thus, he let himself and the country down.<\/p>\n

When Donald Trump returned to the White House, he sounded like he wanted to succeed where Sunstein had failed. He vowed to modernize the government, implement agile information-technology systems, axe unnecessary employees, and save taxpayers billions of dollars a year. To do this, he created DOGE, an acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency and a reference to an internet meme about a shiba inu. He tasked the tech titan Elon Musk with leading the effort. He called it the Manhattan Project of our time.<\/p>\n

Yet DOGE was not Los Alamos. It wasn\u2019t a best-of-the-best professional effort, for one. The agency was a pseudo-governmental commission with no legal authority, staffed by grossly unqualified appointees, including a teenage programmer known as Big Balls. It was not a novel effort either. In 1912, William Howard Taft performed a root-to-stem evaluation of public agencies to ensure \u201cbusiness of the Government\u201d is conducted in \u201cthe most efficient and economical manner.\u201d In 1993, Bill Clinton signed the Government Performance and Results Act, ordering federal agencies to create strategic plans and weigh their success against predetermined targets. A number of long-standing bodies gauge how the civil service is functioning and how programs are spending taxpayer dollars. The Government Accountability Office provides voluminous reports on inefficiency and waste; inspectors general search for graft and incompetence; congressional committees call in agency heads and interrogate them, ensuring that they are meeting their missions.<\/p>\n

DOGE might have been redundant and unnecessary. Nevertheless, it had an explosive impact. Trump eliminated the United States Digital Service, a little-known and highly respected agency with a track record of making government websites work. Musk\u2019s officials infiltrated department after department, canceling contracts, firing employees, viewing sensitive data, and kneecapping programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as foreign aid. The agency made the government less <\/i>efficient. DOGE fired the IT staffers keeping important programs up and running. It forced federal workers to send standard contracts and long-approved projects to political appointees for review. It made civil servants justify \u201ceven the most basic purchases\u201d: fastening bolts for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, lab supplies for the Food and Drug Adminstration. Contrary to its stated mission, DOGE swelled the deficit, hampering tax collection and ginning up millions in legal fees.<\/p>\n

Worst of all, perhaps, DOGE failed to reduce the time tax, or even to address it. Musk and Trump scarcely mentioned the citizen\u2019s customer-service experience as they blathered about draining the swamp. DOGE could have cut the amount of time it takes to fill out the FAFSA, which students use to access college loans. It could have standardized the application processes for Medicaid, SNAP, and housing aid. It could have gotten rid of ancient interfaces and slashed absurd waiting times. It did not.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time\u2014and How to Fix It<\/a> by Annie Lowrey. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington currently estimates that Americans spend 12 billion hours a year filling out government forms, meaning the average person spends six 8-hour workdays filing their taxes, signing up for Medicaid, renewing their driver\u2019s licenses, and applying for government loans. At<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31715,"featured_media":275932,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43092,43095],"tags":[111829,20606,2945,9194,56926,111830,990,24887],"class_list":["post-275883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-annie-lowrey","tag-bureaucracy","tag-ecco","tag-government","tag-harpercollins-publishers","tag-the-time-tax-how-the-government-wastes-our-time-and-how-to-fix-it","tag-time","tag-us-government"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19LJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/paperwork.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31715"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276063,"date":"2026-08-26T05:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276063"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:45:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:45:29","slug":"self-mythologizing-on-the-radio-a-brief-history-of-audio-patriotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/self-mythologizing-on-the-radio-a-brief-history-of-audio-patriotism\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Mythologizing on the Radio: A Brief History of Audio Patriotism"},"content":{"rendered":"

It feels fitting, in the country\u2019s semiquincentennial, to reflect on the ways in which we have mythologized ourselves over the past 250 years.<\/p>\n

As you might imagine, the Golden Age of Radio, in which the medium was in lock-step with the three major commercial networks and their sponsors, produced a glut of blindly patriotic programming. Most of it was propagandist. There was no radio documentary form in this era, so very little framework for audio as something that questioned the narrative.<\/p>\n

Some works directly reflected current events. Time <\/em>magazine\u2019s intriguing combination of promotion and radio drama, The March of Time<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>translated one or two of that week\u2019s print stories into short radio plays. This hybrid form provided a sort \u201cslice of life\u201d approach to American life.<\/p>\n

(Fast forward to the New York Time\u2019s<\/em> podcast The Daily, <\/em>which unpacks one of the paper\u2019s print articles each day.)<\/p>\n

Other programs celebrated the idea of America as an ideal in dramatic form. In 1938, with the Nazi\u2019s advancing in Europe, radio producer Himan Brown created a series called Main Street U.S.A,<\/em> that both celebrated American values and warned of how easy it would be to lose the privilege our much-vaunted freedom allowed. When America entered the war, the government approached Brown about re-working the series to highlight all the ways in which ordinary people could help the war effort through their own initiatives. This new version was called Green Valley U.S.A. <\/em>As Brown recalled it in an oral history interview conducted by the Directors\u2019 Guild of America, \u201cIt was a town in which when we needed the doctor, we had the doctor, the postmaster, the general store, the cab drivers, the hotels. It was a total community of several hundred people whom I could draw on to do a government directive on writing to your boy in the army, on conserving fuel, creating a victory garden, on the need for nurses, or for general people in the army, and so on.<\/p>\n

Americans All, Immigrants All<\/em>, was produced in 1938 and 1939 by the U.S. Office of Education. Its 26 episodes celebrated diversity and the country\u2019s immigrant population as cornerstones of what\u2019s meant by democracy, though Inevitably, some of its language is dated, and its tone sententious, and it does nothing to address issues of racism or, ironically, anti-immigration laws. We can measure its successes and shortcomings ourselves as is now featured on Spotify as well as in archival collections<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thirty years later, Brown, himself the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, created a similar series for Voice of America, also called Americans All, <\/em>and narrated by Charlton Heston. (Heston, a Hollywood icon, has a problematic history himself. He was at one time a supporter of civil rights who marched on Washington and picketed segregated restaurants, but became, in his later years, a conservative Republican and president of the National Rifle Association).<\/p>\n

So how should <\/em>American media\u2014especially, in this context, works for broadcast and podcast\u2014celebrate our 250th? By recognizing that the country is an experiment that must be tested again and again.<\/p>\n

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of the casualties of the Trump administration, was established in 1967. The original intention was to create an instrument through which Congress could fund educational television, but a last-minute revolt by a handful of Midwestern radio stations resulted in the inclusion of radio in the bill, finally titled the Public Broadcasting Act. This in turn resulted in the creation of National Public Radio. Envisaged at first as a news organization, it slowly developed into a unique media culture, and that culture evolved its own documentary form. Features were usually to scale, to fit into the evolving broadcast clock\u2014four to seven minutes being the sweet spot\u2014but long-form documentaries did begin to both celebrate and question the American dream.<\/p>\n

Among the first: Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> NPR\u2019S series on the history and tradition of gospel music and spirituals, produced in cooperation with The Smithsonian by Judi Moore Latta and Sonja Williams.<\/p>\n

The public radio system was not ad supported, but, with its limited budget constantly challenged in Congress, it evolved a relationship with private and corporate foundations. While not precisely dancing with the devil, this did add a layer of unexamined compromise, as noted in by Tom McCourt in Conflicting Communications Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio<\/em><\/a> (Prager, 1999): \u201cThe organizational structure of public radio ensures that the public must continue to adhere to standards of taste instituted by elites and articulated by nonprofit concerns.<\/p>\n

There was an antidote of a kind: The rise of independent producers in the system in the 1980s helped hold to account both public broadcasting and the nation it was reflecting.<\/p>\n

For example the maverick producer Larry Massett, one of the field\u2019s first independents, created \u201cMama Chaos, the Wild Dog of Los Alamos” in which the disordered life of a stray clearly mirrors the state of a country that has ventured into nuclear testing.<\/p>\n

More recently (2019) producer Nikole Hannah-Jones, in partnership with writers from The New York Times<\/em>, and The New York Times Magazine<\/em>, crafted the trenchant The 1619 Project<\/em><\/a>, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the history of slavery and its continuing impact.<\/p>\n

On a smaller, but equally powerful scale, producer KalaLea created Blindspot: Tulsa Burning<\/em><\/a>, which explores the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.<\/p>\n

Another participant in the culture of accountability is Indigenous producer Connie Walker, who looked at the forced re-homing and brutal Christian education of Native Americans through the lens of memoir in her series Surviving St. Michaels<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

An interesting collective approach to American history was PRX Productions\u2019 provocative series Monumental<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> in which features by a range of independent producers interrogated the history as reflected in public monuments.<\/p>\n

But there have been joyful noises too, around the semiquincentennial.<\/p>\n

This Day (An American 250 History Show<\/em>) celebrates unexpected shaping moments with hosts Jody Avirgan, and historians Nicole Hemmer and Kellie Carter Jackson. GBH and PBS repurposed the celebrated television documentary, American Experience<\/em> as a podcast; Our American Stories<\/em> says it highlights extraordinary things done by ordinary people, and Ben Franklin\u2019s America<\/em> looks at the abiding influence of this contentious, inventive Philadelphian among others. (Of course, we can be thankful that one idea didn\u2019t stick\u2014Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird.)<\/p>\n

So how should <\/em>American media\u2014especially, in this context, works for broadcast and podcast\u2014celebrate our 250th? By recognizing that the country is an experiment that must be tested again and again; by being wary of our certainties\u2014\u201cI stumbled when I saw\u201d says Gloucester in Lear,<\/em> echoing John 11:9-10\u2014by continuing to refresh the pot. In fact, public radio, and the United States, are very high-concept versions of stone soup, the subject of that trickster Irish parable in which a pot of boiling water comes to feed a village because each person throws something in.<\/p>\n

If we\u2019re lucky, that is a truth that will remain self-evident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It feels fitting, in the country\u2019s semiquincentennial, to reflect on the ways in which we have mythologized ourselves over the past 250 years. As you might imagine, the Golden Age of Radio, in which the medium was in lock-step with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26074,"featured_media":276064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43092,43095],"tags":[111921,111919,300,5089,11586,106633,100706,111918,48830,111917,111920],"class_list":["post-276063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-conflicting-communications-interests-in-america-the-case-of-national-public-radio","tag-monumental","tag-npr","tag-podcasts","tag-radio","tag-sarah-montague","tag-semiquincentennial","tag-surviving-st-michaels","tag-the-1619-project","tag-this-day-an-american-250-history-show","tag-wade-in-the-water-african-american-sacred-music-traditions"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19OD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-2026-08-21T134858.406.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275984,"date":"2026-08-26T05:08:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275984"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:47:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:47:19","slug":"7-novels-about-obsessive-athletes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/7-novels-about-obsessive-athletes\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Novels About Obsessive Athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Accomplishment in sports, unlike in most other areas of life, is concrete, definitive. There are winners and losers; there are rankings. This all-or-nothing dynamic lends itself to obsession. The narrator of my debut novel, Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/i><\/a>, wants nothing more than to win the World\u2019s Strongest Man competition. When he\u2019s not training, he\u2019s downing as many calories as possible and visualizing himself victorious. His obsession is intensified by his isolation: He\u2019s the black sheep of his family, and his increasingly erratic behavior pushes away his few remaining friends. He listens to motivational self-help tapes on a loop, creating an echo chamber in his mind where everything is confirmation that he\u2019s destined for glory.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long been a fan of the obsessed-athlete novel. Stories have a built-in propulsion when the main character is chasing a tangible goal so doggedly. Everything that happens is defined by its relation to the goal. Every event brings the character closer to their goal or takes them further away, energizing them or creating turmoil. The story can work on two levels\u2014as a straightforward plot, usually culminating in a big match or competition, and as a gradually unfolding character study. I find myself compelled by both. Slowly we learn what drives the athletes\u2014the wounds, insecurities, and longings. Here are some great examples of obsession and sport converging.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Gabe Habash, Stephen Florida<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

On page two of this wrestling novel, the narrator tells us, \u201cMy name is Stephen Florida, and I\u2019m going to win the Division IV NCAA Championship in the 133 weight class.\u201d This fixation drives the rest of the story. In a small North Dakota college town, there is little for Stephen to do but go on long runs and plot countermoves against his future opponents. With such intense focus, Stephen seems destined to reach his goal, but the self-imposed strain causes him to slowly unravel. There is a quietness to this book that I really admire. This approach requires total commitment and confidence. Enjoy this underappreciated gem\u2014just beware the Frogman, who lurks in Stephen\u2019s mind and on every page.<\/p>\n

\"Julie<\/p>\n

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the story of a group of swimmers who find solace in their neighborhood pool. It is their escape from reality, but a mysterious crack in the bottom of the pool floor forces the pool to close. The second half of the novel focuses on Alice, an elderly woman who suffers from dementia. Without the pool to ground her, she begins to spiral. She is taken to a memory care unit and visited by her daughter, who watches her mental state deteriorate. The novel is an impressive highwire act of different perspectives.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

John L. Parker, Jr., Once a Runner<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Quenton Cassidy dreams of running a sub-four-minute mile. His grueling daily training regimen is shown in great detail. It\u2019s fair to say this novel, for the most part, appeals just to dedicated runners. It is a love letter to running. I\u2019m not a runner, but I appreciate the purity of it, and the lack of pretension. It doesn\u2019t strive for anything deeper. For Parker, running is enough.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Emily Thomas Mani, The Church of Wrestling<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

His chance at glory now past, a father transfers wrestling dreams to his 11-year-old daughter, Jenny. Wrestling for them has become a welcome distraction from the fact that Jenny\u2019s mother is dying of cancer. After she passes, Jenny and her father try to find a way to defeat death itself. This book is a great look at how obsession can serve as an escape from the complex reality of life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ashton Politanoff, Dad Had a Bad Day<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In this sad-dad novel, tennis obsession is a symptom of Ned\u2019s emotional decline. The narrator is a former D1 competitor entering middle age. Unemployed with a wife and son, feeling bored and emasculated, he sees a comeback as his way to regain a sense of self-worth. The mini-ecosystem of the tennis club is the perfect setting for Ned\u2019s undoing as he gets drunk at the club bar, attempts to have an affair, and berates his fellow players. Told in compact passages and with a strong bent forward, there is no excess fat to the story. I read it in a single sitting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Quan Barry, We Ride Upon Sticks<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

A girls\u2019 high school field hockey team will resort to anything in order to win the state championship, including witchcraft. The novel uses sports to explore friendship and the expectations society places on young women. Highly recommend this one to anyone who gets a kick out of \u201980s nostalgia.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Leonard Gardner, Fat City<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In deprived postwar Northern California, two men\u2014a young novice and a washed-up pro\u2014see in the brutal sport of boxing an escape from poverty and perhaps a path toward meaning. It feels like a waste to continue describing the details of this one. Just read it. I was completely blown away by the terse, muscular prose, and even more so by Gardner\u2019s profound understanding of human psychology. I had to pause at times because I related to the characters\u2019 thinking in a way that made me uncomfortable. Gardner\u2019s lone novel is a staggering achievement.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Daytona Teddy Riggs<\/a>\u00a0by Drew Buxton is available from Hub City Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accomplishment in sports, unlike in most other areas of life, is concrete, definitive. There are winners and losers; there are rankings. This all-or-nothing dynamic lends itself to obsession. The narrator of my debut novel, Daytona Teddy Riggs, wants nothing more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31748,"featured_media":275994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43107],"tags":[110150,111891,111892,111893,72979,3620,11833,111889,21904,3619,111890,24154,27933,68979,76007,53032],"class_list":["post-275984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-sports","tag-ashton-politanoff","tag-dad-had-a-bad-day","tag-daytona-teddy-riggs","tag-drew-buxton","tag-emily-thomas-mani","tag-fat-city","tag-gabe-habash","tag-john-l-parker","tag-julie-otsuka","tag-leonard-gardner","tag-once-a-runner","tag-quan-barry","tag-stephen-florida","tag-the-church-of-wrestling","tag-the-swimmers","tag-we-ride-upon-sticks"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Nm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/obsessive-athletes.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31748"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275928,"date":"2026-08-26T05:07:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T09:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275928"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:49:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:49:50","slug":"translation-as-a-journey-jessica-sequeira-on-vlady-kociancichs-the-eighth-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/translation-as-a-journey-jessica-sequeira-on-vlady-kociancichs-the-eighth-wonder\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation as a Journey: Jessica Sequeira on Vlady Kociancich\u2019s The Eighth Wonder<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad\u2019s The End of the Tether<\/i>, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Naci\u00f3n<\/i>, \u201chab\u00eda sido muy elogiada\u201d (was highly praised). This translation is present in The Eighth Wonder<\/i><\/a>, explicitly given that the narrator is working on a translation of this book, as well as in more hidden forms.<\/p>\n

Alberto Paradella, the lawyer-turned-writer-turned-translator-turned-journalist-turned-scriptwriter at one point refers to the journey between the Spanish and English versions of the text he is working on as a \u201cdouble itinerary\u201d; the metaphor of the journey as a bidirectional translation, where the very process of moving alters the elements in movement, carries through the book in many ways. In the novel, Paradella cannot seem to finish the translation, due to distractions, heartbreaks, travels, and misplacements of the manuscript. In \u201creal life,\u201d Kociancich did finish the translation, which she worked on at the same time as she wrote The Eighth Wonder<\/i>, and which was published as Con la soga al cuello<\/i> by Emec\u00e9 in an edition with a noose on the cover, later reprinted in an edition by Hyspam\u00e9rica together with Sergio Pitol\u2019s translation of El coraz\u00f3n de las tinieblas<\/i> (Heart of Darkness<\/i>) and a prologue by Jorge Luis Borges.<\/p>\n

There are multiple Spanish translations of The End of the Tether<\/i>\u2014En las<\/i> \u00faltimas<\/i>, Situaci\u00f3n l\u00edmite<\/i>, El cabo de la cuerda<\/i>\u2014but Kociancich\u2019s title Con la soga al cuello<\/i>, which can be more literally translated as With the Rope Around the Neck<\/i>, is my favorite. It slightly shifts Conrad\u2019s title, just as Borges\u2019 title Otra vuelta de tuerca<\/i> (Another Turn of the Screw<\/i>) gave a further swivel to the novella by Henry James.<\/p>\n

Which makes me think: maybe Paradella did<\/i> finish his translation. The entirety of The Eighth Wonder<\/i> could be read as Kociancich\u2019s translation of Conrad\u2019s The End of the Tether <\/i>taken to its extreme, where the translator has entered so deeply into the book that what she translates are not just words, phrases, and ideas, but scenes and atmospheres, so that the book journeys from the colonial world of Singapore to the contemporary world of Buenos Aires. This is something different from \u201crewriting,\u201d The dizzying movements in The End of the Tether<\/i> across land and sea, from the English boardinghouse to the Malaysian coastline, with stops at temporary ports and the only home one\u2019s boat, are mirrored in the Argentine travel journalist\u2019s movements from Villa del Parque to the Berlin metropolis, passing through airports with only books and dreams as one\u2019s home. Transition and movement become the only constant, until it becomes impossible to return or even locate home.<\/p>\n

There is disquiet in the absorption that translation requires, the way the self enters another world at the possible expense of the current one.<\/p>\n

An endless journey, a trip one cannot escape, which might be a synonym for nightmare. Or as Conrad puts it: \u201cCaptain Whalley, substantial and dignified, left well-nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted skurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view, like a forlorn traveler without a home.\u201d From Conrad\u2019s The End of the Tether<\/i> to Kociancich\u2019s La soga al cuello<\/i> to Kociancich\u2019s La octava maravilla<\/i> to this translation The Eighth Wonder<\/i>\u2014this too has been a journey, one of many possible.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Silvina Friera for P\u00e1gina\/12<\/i>, Kociancich said:<\/p>\n

Quer\u00eda incorporar la idea de que todos vivimos traduciendo la realidad, traduciendo a las otras personas, aunque nunca vas a conocer a alguien enteramente. Traduje una de las m\u00e1s hermosas novelas de Joseph Conrad, La soga al cuello<\/i>, hice toda esa experiencia porque no estaba escribiendo ficci\u00f3n. Al traducir a Conrad, a quien venero, me di cuenta de que ten\u00eda que conseguir el tono de la prosa de Conrad. Lo que me qued\u00f3 fue la experiencia de que realmente estaba traduciendo, dando una versi\u00f3n, porque, lo mismo en la vida, hay sentimientos que son intraducibles.<\/p>\n

(I wanted to incorporate the idea that all of us live translating reality, translating other people, even if it\u2019s never possible to know somebody completely. I translated one of the most beautiful novels by Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether<\/i>, I went through that whole experience because I wasn\u2019t writing fiction. While translating Conrad, whom I venerate, I realized that I had to achieve the tone of Conrad\u2019s prose. What stays with me from that experience is that I was translating in the full sense, giving my own version, because just as in life, there are sentiments that are untranslatable.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Eighth Wonder is both things [cinema and journey], because the cinema is a journey, and the journey is the substance of cinema. The two occupy time and space, but outside of the moment in which they exist, they have no reality at all.<\/p>\n

\u2013Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Whalley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his life with its romance, its idyl, and its sorrow.<\/p>\n

\u2013Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether<\/i><\/p>\n

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus: these were Herodotus\u2019 seven ancient wonders. The eighth wonder, in this novel, is simultaneously the journey and the cinema. Both are all-absorbing; both are forms of movement that transform one\u2019s mind. The seventh art of the cinema, and the seven wonders of the world: these are perhaps like the seventh note in a musical scale, the point of maximum tension before the eighth begins a new scale.<\/p>\n

I think of the Spanish phrase \u201cme paso la pel\u00edcula\u201d (I see it as if it were a film), which evokes the moment that one sees everything flash through one\u2019s mind, as if it already happened. There is a pleasure in this capacity for fantasy, for viewing everything at once. Something like the complement to the bardo after death, but projected into the future, where one observes what is to come and develops the seed of the present into a satisfying narrative arc, with all its happiness or tragedy, its \u201crisas y penas\u201d (laughs and griefs), as the salsa singer H\u00e9ctor Lavoe put it. The phrase cradles this paradox; depending on the context, the phrase could mean bliss or tragedy. \u201cMe paso la pel\u00edcula\u201d could be used in almost any context, from the romantic (say, a fantasy about a person one desires) to the terrifying (say, fear of an accident). The capacity to envision bears everything.<\/p>\n

Here we can move to an actual film. The brief 1978 documentary Borges para millones<\/i> begins with the process itself of shooting, attentive to its own creation. Then it abruptly cuts to Borges, seated in a chair, with waxen-looking skin and carved features, in Technicolor. He speaks fast, like an automaton, without pauses, as if he\u2019d spoken the same lines a million times before, opining that typical Argentines are from everywhere, \u201cf\u00e1cilmente cosmopolitos\u201d (easily cosmopolitan), and should thus read all the books, live all the experiences, \u201cno negarnos a nada\u201d (deny ourselves nothing). He is currently learning Icelandic, he says. The documentary speaks of Borges as an incessant traveler, a mythical public figure; it speaks of his childhood memories with their endless mirrors, of his books of poetry, and of how one is constantly working at literature via the imagination. Images of the streets of Buenos Aires appear in faded yellow, including an inner patio with a palm tree.<\/p>\n

Borges wasn\u2019t just a poet shut away isolated in his library, the documentary argues, even if he spent infinite hours poring over Rafael Cansinos-Ass\u00e9ns\u2019s translation of The Thousand and One Nights<\/i>, the writings of Macedonio Fern\u00e1ndez, and so many other works, along with writing for the magazine Sur<\/i> and working at the Biblioteca Nacional. The death of his father hit him hard; the rain in \u201cLa lluvia\u201d brings this figure back:<\/p>\n

Porque ya cae la lluvia
\nminuciosa. Cae o cay\u00f3. La lluvia
\nes una cosa Que sin duda sucede
\nen el pasado.<\/p>\n

(…) Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales
\nAlegrar\u00e1 en perdidos arrabales
\nLas negras uvas de una parra en cierto
\nPatio que ya no existe. La mojada
\nTarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada, De
\nmi padre que vuelve y que no ha
\nmuerto.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Because now the infinitely fine rain
\nfalls. It falls, or fell. The rain is
\nsomething
\nThat no doubt happened in the past.<\/p>\n

(…) This rain that blinds the glass
\nWill bring joy to a godforsaken suburb
\nAnd black grapes on a vine in a certain<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Patio that no longer exists. The wet
\nAfternoon brings me the voice, the desired voice,
\nOf my father, who returns and has not died.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An episode of septicemia, with its hells and paradises, its nightmares and hallucinations, transforms Borges into a story writer. There are lyrical scenes that show a guitarist playing for his shadow on the wall, a street fighter struggling with a never-seen assassin; there are psychedelic sequences of a hand plucking a yellow flower, sugar overspilling a teacup, a dead man lying on the steps, a woman dancing in gauzy white scarves and looking out from a balcony at ruins, a doll with red hair sitting in a chair in flames, in the middle of a battlefield.<\/p>\n

The waxen Borges speaks of the fascinations of the labyrinth, a building purposely constructed for people to get lost in, and of the garden as a lost labyrinth, as in his story \u201cEl jard\u00edn de senderos que se bifurcan\u201d (\u201cThe Garden of Forking Paths\u201d). He speaks of writers as architects of labyrinths, of books that bifurcate and multiply, of dancers that weave mazes in time, of joy that becomes torment, and of how in the magical flipping of the pages, past, present, and future might coexist. Also of the Minotaur and the golden thread of Ariadne. Of how the fear we are lost coexists with the hope there is an architecture for the world, a secret center that, divine or demoniacal, means coherence, not chaos. Of how each language is a series of laws for the game, of how language is an artificial system compared with reality. Of how he writes with the starts and ends of books in mind, with the writing process a journey between them. He speaks of death as a consolation, and of how the task of man is to arrange the conditions for his own end. Of how immortality would be hell. And of his fascination in the idea that people might go on living after death, in oblivion. He speaks of his blindness, of how he has lost the colors red, white, and black (darkness is a myth, as he cannot find darkness even in sleep), of how he now lives in a yellow mist. He has returned to the gold of the tigers that fascinated him in his childhood, the title of his book of poems, El oro de los tigres<\/i> (The Gold of the Tigers<\/i>): the first and last color. He speaks of how he wants to die. He speaks of how he is happy.<\/p>\n

Language travels and shifts through time just like the characters in the book. And for those attentive to them, these shifts can be as world-configuring as external events.<\/p>\n

The script is a work of art. Vlady Kociancich is the co-writer and appears in the opening credits. In a sense, The Eighth Wonder<\/i>, with its subplot to do with writing a film script about an Indigenous poet lauded by millions, whom nobody genuinely knows, also translates this documentary about Borges, with its many images, into a different plot. Or perhaps the mirrors of its labyrinths began to weave themselves in the mind of Kociancich years before, in her student years, when she studied the verbal music of old English alongside Borges, her friend.<\/p>\n

El mundo es unas cuantas tiernas imprecisiones.
\nEl r\u00edo, el primer r\u00edo. El hombre, el primer hombre<\/p>\n

(The world is a few tender imprecisions.
\nThis river, the first river. This man, the first man)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Borges wrote these lines in his poem \u201cManuscrito hallado en un libro de Joseph Conrad\u201d (\u201cManuscript Found in a Book by<\/p>\n

Joseph Conrad\u201d).<\/p>\n

The happiness my translations gave me was not free of disquiet. Soon I discovered that my fear was ridiculous, that the people who lectured me on my contempt for reality, and themselves seemed so alert to it, were alert only to their own dream.<\/p>\n

\u2013Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder<\/i><\/p>\n

What to the other parties was merely the sale of a ship was to him a momentous event involving a radically new view of existence.<\/p>\n

\u2013Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether<\/i><\/p>\n

There is disquiet in the absorption that translation requires, the way the self enters another world at the possible expense of the current one. Others might perceive you as pie in the sky, head in the clouds, even take advantage of you in your perceived absence. This is, at least, how Alberto Paradella portrays translation in Kociancich\u2019s novel; he admits that translation creates worlds for him more interesting to him than the \u201creal\u201d one, even as he realizes this is a possible synonym for what others see as madness, and insinuates that as he translates, his wife gets up to other activities. There is a fear at the root of Paradella\u2019s argument that translated life outstrips real life, and that the real world seems less rich than the world of the book, to the extent one will not want to come back, or be unable.<\/p>\n

To live, even write, is to be there, other. To translate is to be here, oneself. Similarly, for the protagonist of Conrad\u2019s story, Captain Whalley, the true life is the life of ships, and changes of fates onshore seem only laterally relevant, near unreal. Even his beloved daughter exists as a figment of his imagination. Why could one possibly want to live somewhere else, or in constant movement, instead of existing wholly and firmly in the world? Where is the pleasure in this? I, thinking of Paradella (and Kociancich and Conrad) need to believe that translation in texts, and through air and sea, need not be masochism or escapism, or a form of going mad in the purgatorial back-and-forth waves of language. There must be a pleasure in losing oneself in the details of something not oneself. What is this pleasure?<\/p>\n

The seventh definition of \u201clove\u201d in the Diccionario de la lengua espa\u00f1ola<\/i> of the Real Academia Espa\u00f1ola is: \u201cEsmero con que se trabaja una obra deleit\u00e1ndose en ella.\u201d (The care with which one dedicates oneself to a work, finding delight in it.) The first is: \u201cSentimiento intenso del ser humano que, partiendo de su propia insuficiencia, necesita y busca el encuentro y uni\u00f3n con otro ser.\u201d (Intense sentiment of the human being that, departing from their own sufficiency, needs and seeks out the encounter and union with another being.)<\/p>\n

When I discovered that this mutation, this sort of deformed dwarf that vigorously leapt about in language, was stretching out its hand to me, my admiration for the supposed whims of the language had no limits.<\/p>\n

\u2013Vlady Kociancich, The Eighth Wonder\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Did words mean anything? Whence did the gift of speech come? The violent beating of his heart reverberated in his head\u2014 seemed to shake his brain to pieces.<\/p>\n

\u2013Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether<\/i><\/p>\n

A woman sitting in front of me at the notarial office has a tattoo on her back. It is a hot summer day and her minimal clothing reveals the entire ship, which has multiple overlapping sails. Tired, I look at it without looking. Then her number is called. When she turns toward the counter, the angle of her skin and the light shift. The tattoo briefly changes its form\u2014now it looks like a claw\u2014and then vanishes from sight. Is translation the ship? The focus of the light? The move to another seat, where one can see from another angle?<\/p>\n

The tics of language, so easy to pick up almost without realizing\u2014repetitions of transitional phrases like \u201cyou know\u201d or \u201csuper,\u201d colloquial local expressions, such as \u201cme paso la pelicula,\u201d localisms of a Galician waiter, or those Spanish refrains that prior to his phase as a translator Paradella copies from a book, which filter into his speech\u2014replicate themselves with ease, making their way into one\u2019s language as unconscious imitation. (Of writing from other parts of the world, too: Victoria Ocampo smiles toward France from her happy oblivion in the afterlife.)<\/p>\n

Translation is a mutation of language, but not direct replication; something happens in the process that shifts the direction of the ideas. Language travels and shifts through time just like the characters in the book. And for those attentive to them, these shifts can be as world-configuring as external events.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> The Eighth Wonder<\/a> by Vlady Kociancich, translated by Jessica Sequeira. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from Seven Stories Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Along with her novels, Vlady Kociancich worked on a translation of Joseph Conrad\u2019s The End of the Tether, which according to her obituary by Daniel Gigena in La Naci\u00f3n, \u201chab\u00eda sido muy elogiada\u201d (was highly praised). This translation is present<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10186,"featured_media":275936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43073],"tags":[11120,80269,19064,5577,111874,1262,111873],"class_list":["post-275928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-on-translation","tag-argentina","tag-jessica-sequeira","tag-latin-american-literature","tag-seven-stories-press","tag-the-eighth-wonder","tag-translation","tag-vlady-kociancich","story-type-latin-american-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ms","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/7S-Kociancich_Eighth_Wonder_PB_mech-1-fc5c78d18ff17b6636e24be68f65e955-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275295,"date":"2026-08-26T04:51:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T08:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275295"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:52:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:52:04","slug":"the-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last time I saw my mother, she walked me to the door to say goodbye. Then, before closing it again, she waited until I disappeared down the funnel of the stairwell. My mother was never one for parting phrases, mainly because she was overwhelmed by a form of timidity that verged on self-erasure. Which, in practice, made any kind of performance impossible for her: considering herself such a marginal figure, she couldn\u2019t take center stage, even briefly. For that same reason, I believe, she didn\u2019t think she had the right to proclaim the beginning or end of anything. Whenever I visited them, she would be standing behind my father both when the door first opened and later, when it closed and swallowed them inside.<\/p>\n

Yet on that day it was she who said goodbye to me last, alone on her side of the threshold, at the top of the stairs. It was more than a farewell: she somehow followed me. With the perspective of the intervening years, I\u2019m inclined to say she was unable to let me go. In any case, as I made my retreat, covering each step with a smoke screen of words, she advanced at a similar pace. Seen through the lens of writing, the scene resembles a dance: a man takes a step back and a woman a matching step forward, the son takes another step, the mother another, until the exit is gained.<\/p>\n

The last words I heard my mother utter were not a statement but a question. Which, again, stood in sharp contrast to her usual attitude of acceptance, of submission rather than demand, of being accountable to others rather than asking anything of them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill you come see us again?\u201d she asked, advancing toward me as I slipped away. I think she looked me in the eyes, but that\u2019s more a guess than a blurry memory, since I didn\u2019t meet her gaze.<\/p>\n

Her question was completely out of place; there was no reason to ask it. Every two weeks or so, I drove the seventy kilometers from Turin to spend a few hours with my parents, usually for lunch. After the meal, after the coffee, I\u2019d get back in my car and drive home. I\u2019d been doing this a long time, since leaving home at twenty under the traditional pretext of college. By the time of her question, I was forty-one. Which means that for twenty-one years I had been visiting them with a regularity that could only seem routine. So there was no reason to doubt that, after that day, the routine would repeat again and again, forever. What\u2019s more, I was a son and they were the people who had given me life \u2013 a situation that ought to have banished all doubt.<\/p>\n

I would add that not only was the question patently out of place given the circumstances, it was one I had never before asked myself, one that had never even occurred to me to consider. \u201cWill you visit us again?\u201d she asked. No answer to that question was ever given. The \u201cOf course\u201d that I left behind on the landing was uttered only so that something would happen, so that my mother would release her grip and I could slip away down the stairs. It wasn\u2019t a reply for the simple reason that the question itself, posed by a mother to a son, was one that couldn\u2019t be asked.<\/p>\n

Yet my mother had asked it, out of instinct. After so many years of receding, of not existing for either herself or her children, of cleaning and serving and obeying her husband at home and in bed, of performing the little or nothing my father expected or demanded of her, she concluded with a motherly act: she sensed what had already taken place within her son, without his knowing it yet.<\/p>\n

On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I\u2019ve changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I\u2019ve erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They\u2019ve been the best ten years of my life.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never written about my mother. I never thought it worth the trouble to speak of her, and indeed I never really have, to anyone. Even in the most intimate conversations, if she came up it was only for the glimmer of a single word embedded in a sentence. Her place in the world seemed too insignificant to merit an audience. All the family\u2019s attention was focused on my father, who demanded center stage and had authored, as it were, the sole version of the family mythology \u2013 about a man whom life owed everything, implying that the rest of us had to pay, to burn with him in the flames. To put it another way, I believed in his version, and so it never occurred to me that there was anything worth saying about her. The only thing that mattered about her life was that she had come into the world. Her remaining there, in the world, was beneath notice.<\/p>\n

Even now I can only catch glimpses of her life, as through a glass darkly, in the homes we lived in. Rummaging through the accordion files of my visual memories, I find little. There is no space under her jurisdiction, no corner of the apartment \u2013 no room, no seat, no window \u2013 in which I can bring her entirely into focus. And yet she did sit, did open and close windows, put dirty laundry in the wash and hang it to dry, dress and undress, go to bed each night. I know this because it must be so, it cannot be otherwise. But it left no traces in me.<\/p>\n

Not even the kitchen, that space that had been socially assigned to her, was truly hers. I know it was she who cooked, I know she set the table and washed the dishes, but I can\u2019t picture her doing such things, can\u2019t see her standing at the stove or opening the fridge. It\u2019s much easier for me to visualize my father\u2019s absence in front of the sink: I know he didn\u2019t wash dishes, didn\u2019t cook. Or if he did, it was such an exception to the general rule that it turned to dust in memory. What\u2019s certain is that I can\u2019t see my mother who, each day, did such things in that place.<\/p>\n

I know she did certain chores each day, but nothing ever settled into habit. For a habit to be formed, it requires a body to claim it, and my mother did not possess a body, or rather not an autonomous one. Even her body only existed as an expression of my father. Chores (shopping, cooking, cleaning, picking us up from school) were the strings that \u2013 controlled by his will \u2013 moved her body around our home, or through the spaces that separated our home from everything else.<\/p>\n

Of her body I recall mostly oral clues \u2013 and the one leg that was slightly skinnier between the knee and ankle, a result of childhood polio. It gave her a faint limp, one I doubt was even noticeable to others. Whenever I saw her calf \u2013 this I do know \u2013 I felt a kind of painful affection. She wore it with a nonchalance that was somewhere between innocence and carelessness. I never heard her speak of it; her body was not a topic of discussion. It was invisible, it was the bastion of her invisibility. Though barely noticeable, her polio leg \u2013 if one can call it that \u2013 was the only thing that violated this invisibility of hers, condemned her to be seen. I think that\u2019s what I found painful about it.<\/p>\n

Another sign of my mother\u2019s body was the incongruous scent of perfume in the house on Saturday afternoons, lingering in the air after she went out with my father. I should say they went out for a walk, but this action is filed in my memory under the expression \u201cHe took her for a walk.\u201d That\u2019s how my father described that time they spent together outside the house, as if he were walking a dog.<\/p>\n

As for other physical signs: there was the period of her night-time kidney pains, when moans, if not outright cries, would issue from my parents\u2019 bedroom. She must have experienced those stabbing pains in her side even during the day, but I have no recollection of it. For some reason, her spasms of agony were never spoken of in the daytime; there was no place for them in the family discourse. They were not recorded, that is, in the so-called official version, but remained confined to the dream zone.<\/p>\n

I noticed them only if they happened in the shallows of my sleep cycle, perhaps as I was flipping the pillow before sinking back into a deeper sleep.<\/p>\n

All that came to an end when her kidney stones were removed. Her convalescence left no trace in me other than the sense of peace \u2013 writing about it now makes space for it, stretches it across the page \u2013 and the serene light in that room on the third or fourth floor of the hospital. Here, you might say, my mother occupies center stage, tended to by doctors and nurses. They care for her as befits her condition, as patients are typically cared for: they take her temperature, clean her wound, give her meals in bed, collect her tray when she\u2019s done, check on her in the night. In this scene one fact stands out above others: power over her \u2013 over her body, her person \u2013 has been taken away from my father and handed over to another authority, the state. Now it is she who must sign paperwork, write her own name to accept treatment, affirm that she understands the risks to her own life. No one else \u2013 certainly not her husband \u2013 can certify such things for her, no one else can submit to the scalpel that will cut into her to give her relief.<\/p>\n

And then to bask in that confinement, in not having to worry about lunch or dinner or changing the sheets. A confinement that is also a fortress. She may be alone in this scene, but it seems important that she isn\u2019t secondary, isn\u2019t in any way marginal. It is this scene \u2013 my mother lying in bed, head propped on a pillow, attended by staff who are paid by the state to make her better \u2013 that is our point of departure.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter if it happened exactly that way or not; that\u2019s how this novel begins.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Anniversary<\/a> by Andrea Bajani and translated by Geoffrey Brock, published by Other Press on August 25, 2026. Copyright \u00a9 Andrea Bajani and translated by Geoffrey Brock. Reprinted by permission of Other Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last time I saw my mother, she walked me to the door to say goodbye. Then, before closing it again, she waited until I disappeared down the funnel of the stairwell. My mother was never one for parting phrases,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[66454,60840,1162,88957,1262],"class_list":["post-275295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-andrea-bajani","tag-geoffrey-brock","tag-other-press","tag-the-anniversary","tag-translation","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Cf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9781635426182.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276202,"date":"2026-08-26T04:01:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T08:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276202"},"modified":"2026-08-25T17:36:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T21:36:16","slug":"s-shakthidharan-on-hermann-hesses-siddhartha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/s-shakthidharan-on-hermann-hesses-siddhartha\/","title":{"rendered":"S. Shakthidharan on Hermann Hesse\u2019s Siddhartha<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast features a series of conversations with past and present Windham-Campbell Prize<\/a> winners about their favorite books and plays. Hosted by Michael Kelleher.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Mike chats with S. Shakthidharan (or Shakthi) about Hilda Rosner’s translation of Siddhartha, <\/em>Herman Hesse’s classic novel of self-discovery and enlightenment.<\/p>\n