Against Everything ─ Essays

A brilliant collection of critical essays by a young writer who is already a star in the intellectual firmament—a book of scope and acuity worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Over the course of eleven years Mark Greif has been publishing superb and in some cases superstar essays in n+1, the high-profile little magazine that he co-founded with some Harvard classmates. These essays address such key topics in the cultural and intellectual life of our time as the tyranny of exercise, the tyranny of nutrition and food snobbery, the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), the philosophical meaning of Radiohead, the rise and fall of the hipster, the impact of the Occupy movement, and the crisis of policing. Each essay is learned, original, highly entertaining, and, from start to finish, dead serious. They are the work of a young intellectual who, with his peers, is reinventing and reinvigorating what intellectuals can be and say and do. An important contribution to the higher mental life of our vexed time.

MARK GREIF received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard in history and literature and an MPhil from Oxford in English as a British Marshall Scholar. In 2004, he co-founded the literary and intellectual journal n+1 in New York and has been a principal at the maga­zine since then. He earned a PhD in American studies from Yale in 2007. Since 2008, he has been on the faculty of the New School in New York, where he is currently an associate professor. His previous book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973, was published in 2015. Greif has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and, for 2016–17, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.