I love that I can instantly find something to read in your New(ish) Books tab -- and that you also help steer me clear of many titles that I might unknowingly subject myself to.
For instance, I love that we agree about Ocean Vuong. And I appreciate how you give Cline even-handed treatment here, honestly noting what works for you, but not overpraising the book, either. I wish I could find more honest reviews like this, since pretty much every book has blurbs overselling it as a work of genius. But I'm certainly glad that I have yours as a staple.
Bowles looks like a must-read. Very much appreciate your attempt to resolve the woke/anti-woke binary here. I hope that your past tense "was" for this cultural revolution is right, and that it is firmly in our rear view, even if we are still climbing out of the wreckage.
I found no flaw with The Guest. To me the best part of it was the ambivalence I felt toward the protagonist who is the only real "round" character. All the others are there for her to interact with and are purposeful stereotypes.
I alternated between cheering her on and thinking she was awful, sometimes on the same page. That's not an easy thing to pull off. I read it about a year ago, and I remember being satisfied with the ending.
I don't think Cline made a single misstep in sketching certain Hamptons scenes. Most books do, e.g., Fleischmann's In Trouble.
Below was my own mini review inside a post from last June.
"What prompted me to write this post was my recent read of my favorite new novel of the year, Emma Cline’s “The Guest.” It’s set in the Hamptons and follows Alex, a 22 year-old call girl, scratching and clawing to survive the end of the Hamptons summer. It’s Labor Day week and, like a twisted version of Odysseus, Alex must use her wiles to confront a cavalcade of vapid, foolish, unhappy rich people.
Alex as the protagonist is a true original and to Cline’s credit I still can’t decide how to feel about her. The rest of the characters represent familiar tropes, no matter how well sketched. The late middle-aged men who use young girls as arm-candy, the mostly absent father and his resentful, mentally ill son, the personal assistants appended at the whip-end of the whims of their masters and mistresses, the aging women with obsessively exercised slim legs struggling to appear decades younger (at least from a distance), the house-sharing, declasse twenty-somethings, and the obligatory unsupervised, privileged teenagers doing drugs and hooking up. At the grown-up parties we attend as literary guests of Alex, we listen to snatches of dull conversation dominated by the meme of “how beautiful it is out here.”
In other words, “The Guest” is guaranteed to confirm for readers all the stereotypes about the Hamptons. And it will confirm to those who do not “summer” there, whether by choice or budget, that they are hardly missing out, but instead have dodged a bullet.
As for those of us who do spend time out there, I guarantee that many of us will buy and read (or claim to have read) this book. And I equally guarantee that we will all say, “That’s not me at all! That’s not the Hamptons I know! I’d never say things like that or even think them.” And while I might claim the same, there are a few passages that struck home. Both because they’re so well written and because they’re true. And because in fact while I read them, I nodded along.
Alex’s fifty something boyfriend brings her to a dinner party at one of those rare, magical houses perched high enough above the ocean so that her view
“…was only water, flat and silvered, appearing to stretch from the edge of the terrace to the hot-pink line of the horizon. What would it be like to live here, to occupy this unfettered beauty every day? Could you become used to the shock of water? The envy acted like adrenaline in Alex’s body, a swift and enlivening rush to the head. It was better, sometimes, to never know certain things existed.”
Here's Alex a few days later sitting outside at another estate, this one with expansive, pristine lawns and gardens. She’s gained entry through false pretenses. She hears a leaf blower and a lawn mower and watches the ceaseless circuit of a man removing garbage.
“So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.”
Finally, here’s Alex’s thoughts about the twenty-something house-share people she meets.
“They would leave here Monday night, imagining they had gotten close to something, had some rarified experience. The truth was that the world they imagined would never include them.”
Nice review David! Glad you really connected with the book. (And that you share my misgivings about Fleischmann Is In Trouble! - which seemed to me to be basically one long false note.) My reading of The Guest is beset by a major case of Cline-envy. She's so outrageously talented that I can find it a little difficult just to concentrate normally on the story. I didn't quite buy it that Cline was fully inhabiting Alex's psyche - it felt to me more like she had met a high-class escort once or done some interviews - but, to be honest, I was looking to nitpick at the novel! Could easily imagine an intelligent reader feeling like her character worked perfectly.
She may very well have spoken to a real life Alex. I will say this. I started and soon put down her debut novel, The Girls. It didn't catch my interest. Randomly, since it seems we share some literary tastes, did you ever read A Calling For Charlie Barnes by Josh Ferris? I loved that book.
That's good to hear David! I thought Then We Came To The End was fabulous when I read it - probably the best contemporary American novel out there - and then it seemed like the light just went out for Ferris. The Unnamed and To Rise Again At A Decent Hour were total busts. But glad to hear that he recovered. Look forward to reading A Calling For Charlie Barnes.
Thank you Josh! Definitely feel aligned with you in terms of taste and sensibility. And glad somebody else sees through the smoke-and-mirrors of Vuong! I'm a bit baffled as to how his stuff has been praised as much as it has.
I've become really aware recently of how much reviews are an extension of the publishing industry and are written in a kind of code. Debut novels are always lauded, sophomore novels always trashed, prizes and accolades handed out on a certain kind of schedule in a writer's career, etc. n+1 had a good piece awhile ago digging under the hood of reviews and making clear the extent to which freelance reviewers are singing for their supper within the industry and so need to be very careful in aligning with standard tastes. I also don't really don't know, come to think of it, why reviews should be hosted in newspapers. Why is The New York Times the right venue for assessing literary work?
Hoping that the reviews here are a small part of some wider shift in taste - towards reviewers acting more as free agents and just saying very simply what they think of a work without worrying about offending.
Loved Cline's 2016 novel, THE GIRLS. She's got major raw talent. Haven't read the new one but I should. I've been listening to interviews with Bowles; she sounds exactly on point, especially re the gaslighting, lying and denial which is de rigour of the New Left.
Have to read The Girls. Bowles is really smart and interesting. The concern with The Free Press is that it's becoming Republican auxiliary, but it's hard to argue with Bowles' critique of liberal institutions.
I’m always hesitant to disabuse you of your enthusiasm for Bari Weiss because you love her so much and why not? She’s a lovable goddess of wrath. So content to watch it burn. I could describe what I consider the true roots of her project because I literally watched her grow up and know her project is a family business. (By the way, I think you want to describe Nellie not as her sidekick but her wife and the mother of their children).
One of her ancestors was Harry Houdini, a debunker of myths but also a creator of his own. She follows a family tradition of being a gadfly at the dining table: buttressed by a wealthy and indulgent liberal family that her father Lou presided over, whose trick was regaling all in attendance with his over the top right-wing polemics that absolutely no one ever agreed with (“oh that’s just Lou being Lou - pass the lox please”) so I can see through the shtick that you may miss. Being right wing was attention seeking and it worked: it’s made her a fortune and allowed her to employ her family just as her grandfather and her father before her.
Bari’s lucrative Free Press, it’s a reckless feckless hollow version of the critique of late stage liberalism that others do more sincerely and thoughtfully. The Weiss version is stick em till they squawk then walk away with a gleam in your eye ! It’s rhetorical sport with zero consequences.
Nellie was dazzled - Bari was a charismatic and adored child and still to this day that’s the source of her power.
For Bari to walk away from the NYT was the sort of bravery of the bail bondsman - she was born into generational wealth and a deeply coherent Jewish community, surrounded by love and connection. She learned a craft and made money from it but there is nothing journalistic about it. Nothing is ever deeply researched there. It’s “feelings” based critique. She says stuff to “see what happens when I do”. Bari is not a journalist has no journalistic training (she studied education at Columbia and her first job in her early twenties - that dad Lou helped her get- was as an opinion writer for the WSJ) so to attribute any notion of authority to her work is the most maddening part of it all. Anyway, I do know you think the world of her and think she’s a brave journalist for going after the wokerati but that’s a dum project too. We actually do need to work on being a genuinely multicultural society where we share power with people unlike us. Does that result in missteps and hypocrisy? Yes, moving the culture forward is a messy project that the Free Press has zero interest in pursuing. Build new structures. Tell new stories. Invent the 21st century.
It's really a shame! I was expecting it to be like the novel-of-the-generation or something. I can't quite figure out if Cline just took a wrong pass at the ending or if it didn't come together because she wasn't fully inhabiting her character. I suspect the latter.
....not sure you need this info, but started reading "The Guest" yesterday-for now seems what I sorely need these days-very engaging...thank you, I wouldn't know of the book if not for your review here
Great review of The Guest by Emma Cline. I just finished reading it: the ending was a letdown but the writing so mesmerizing, it wasn't about the story anymore but the crafting of sentences. Cline certainly is an outstanding stylist.
Thank you Petra! Yeah, I almost feel mean or something picking holes in anything in this book. She's the real deal as a writer and given all the ways publishing isn't really rewarding style at the moment it's great that she's getting the recognition that she is. Really liked your colors post btw!
Thanks Sam - that’s a compliment coming from you! You set the bar high here on Substack and your posts have inspired me to add more substance to my own.
I also enjoyed the Guest in that I found it very fascinating as opposed to very good. Your essay helped me understand why. Also, this line was so great: “like Catcher in the Rye if Holden were a hooker on painkillers.”
I have to say about CHAZ, since I live near the site, that for it (as opposed to the immediate downtown protest) it WAS really a block party atmosphere during the day. I have pictures of my grandkids eating ice-cream there. And the deaths were never really established as done by the protestors. There were I think four, maybe three. One was of a guy who stole a jeep and ran it across the lawn INTO a bunch of protestors just sitting there. One of them shot him. The others were on the fringes--"in the neighborhood" but not in the park. Basically people walking by. One is thought to have been gang-related. (I'm operating from memory, here).
What escalated was at night. The problem with protests like this is that they attract the cuckoos, the disrupters, the thugs, who aren't in it for the protests. At one point, one NIGHT again, it got really out of hand and there was the attack on a precinct building. That occurred after the cops DID begin to crack down. But again, they never really established that the instigators were protestors. The other problem is the mob effect--the crowd phenomenon. Get enough people together who are angry but non-violent and small things set them off into things they wouldn't otherwise dream of doing. Yes, there was a lot of property damage, mostly to things like 7-11s.
One bit was the burning of cop cars. Rioters out of control, yes? Well, no. They caught the perp--it was one, an already disturbed woman from out of state who was wandering around and as far as I can tell not interested in the reason for the protests. She just wanted to burn things.
I'm not condoning mob action, obviously. But in volatile situations shit happens.
My problem with the word "woke" is that it is used as if those who hold its values should be treated as a lump. It used to be called PC, and THAT aspect of it went often too far --things like the "whiteness as octopus" language, or my particular bugaboo "trigger warnings" and to a lesser event "safe spaces." There is a grain of truth in some of those things--there IS white privilege but it is way more subtle than it is portrayed. Don't start me on male privilege--I am retired from a male-dominated profession--construction law-- and have many war stories about the absolute arrogance of men I encountered. Interestingly that came mainly from the lawyers, not the actual contractors I dealt with daily, particularly the small contractors. And some people are in fact already traumatized and find books that relate stories close to their experience upsetting. But again, it goes too far; people who haven't experienced trauma actually often THINK they have, and the trigger warning fad keeps them from reading things that HELP understand the roots of the trauma. My rule is that the only trigger warning I want to see is "the dog dies."
I'm not sure why a black guy owning a "1.4 million dollar home" is in need of an expose. Around here, that is a relatively cheap house. You think those in the black middle class don't encounter racism? Our former county Councilman was black: he has related how he was constantly being stopped by cops simply because he was going home to his nice middle class neighborhood. I doubt he was at CHAZ but I'm sure he was upset about what happened to George Floyd.
I'm glad she recognizes the good side of "wokeness" which is basically a matter of being aware and of exercising empathy; that's how pretty much all my friends are, and we are all elders who have watched and experienced first hand the things our country has gone through from the 50s onward. I think of the more extreme PC types, usually in college, as partaking in something like a large scale Instagram fad--all those dumb "challenges."
I consider myself left of center but not deeply "progressive." I agree with a lot of progressive ideals, but think specific policies can't be imposed until widely accepted; we have seen that kind of acceptance over the years from ending Jim Crow to gay marriage to broader healthcare.
My main bugaboo in life is overgeneralization---the drawing of conclusions from a few examples about a whole group and then condemning (or praising) the group. The Gaza war is RIFE with that kind of thing. It feels like our whole society, world wide, wants easy simple answers to everything and that just isn't how reality works.
I love that I can instantly find something to read in your New(ish) Books tab -- and that you also help steer me clear of many titles that I might unknowingly subject myself to.
For instance, I love that we agree about Ocean Vuong. And I appreciate how you give Cline even-handed treatment here, honestly noting what works for you, but not overpraising the book, either. I wish I could find more honest reviews like this, since pretty much every book has blurbs overselling it as a work of genius. But I'm certainly glad that I have yours as a staple.
Bowles looks like a must-read. Very much appreciate your attempt to resolve the woke/anti-woke binary here. I hope that your past tense "was" for this cultural revolution is right, and that it is firmly in our rear view, even if we are still climbing out of the wreckage.
Hi Josh and Sam,
I found no flaw with The Guest. To me the best part of it was the ambivalence I felt toward the protagonist who is the only real "round" character. All the others are there for her to interact with and are purposeful stereotypes.
I alternated between cheering her on and thinking she was awful, sometimes on the same page. That's not an easy thing to pull off. I read it about a year ago, and I remember being satisfied with the ending.
I don't think Cline made a single misstep in sketching certain Hamptons scenes. Most books do, e.g., Fleischmann's In Trouble.
Below was my own mini review inside a post from last June.
"What prompted me to write this post was my recent read of my favorite new novel of the year, Emma Cline’s “The Guest.” It’s set in the Hamptons and follows Alex, a 22 year-old call girl, scratching and clawing to survive the end of the Hamptons summer. It’s Labor Day week and, like a twisted version of Odysseus, Alex must use her wiles to confront a cavalcade of vapid, foolish, unhappy rich people.
Alex as the protagonist is a true original and to Cline’s credit I still can’t decide how to feel about her. The rest of the characters represent familiar tropes, no matter how well sketched. The late middle-aged men who use young girls as arm-candy, the mostly absent father and his resentful, mentally ill son, the personal assistants appended at the whip-end of the whims of their masters and mistresses, the aging women with obsessively exercised slim legs struggling to appear decades younger (at least from a distance), the house-sharing, declasse twenty-somethings, and the obligatory unsupervised, privileged teenagers doing drugs and hooking up. At the grown-up parties we attend as literary guests of Alex, we listen to snatches of dull conversation dominated by the meme of “how beautiful it is out here.”
In other words, “The Guest” is guaranteed to confirm for readers all the stereotypes about the Hamptons. And it will confirm to those who do not “summer” there, whether by choice or budget, that they are hardly missing out, but instead have dodged a bullet.
As for those of us who do spend time out there, I guarantee that many of us will buy and read (or claim to have read) this book. And I equally guarantee that we will all say, “That’s not me at all! That’s not the Hamptons I know! I’d never say things like that or even think them.” And while I might claim the same, there are a few passages that struck home. Both because they’re so well written and because they’re true. And because in fact while I read them, I nodded along.
Alex’s fifty something boyfriend brings her to a dinner party at one of those rare, magical houses perched high enough above the ocean so that her view
“…was only water, flat and silvered, appearing to stretch from the edge of the terrace to the hot-pink line of the horizon. What would it be like to live here, to occupy this unfettered beauty every day? Could you become used to the shock of water? The envy acted like adrenaline in Alex’s body, a swift and enlivening rush to the head. It was better, sometimes, to never know certain things existed.”
Here's Alex a few days later sitting outside at another estate, this one with expansive, pristine lawns and gardens. She’s gained entry through false pretenses. She hears a leaf blower and a lawn mower and watches the ceaseless circuit of a man removing garbage.
“So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.”
Finally, here’s Alex’s thoughts about the twenty-something house-share people she meets.
“They would leave here Monday night, imagining they had gotten close to something, had some rarified experience. The truth was that the world they imagined would never include them.”
Nice review David! Glad you really connected with the book. (And that you share my misgivings about Fleischmann Is In Trouble! - which seemed to me to be basically one long false note.) My reading of The Guest is beset by a major case of Cline-envy. She's so outrageously talented that I can find it a little difficult just to concentrate normally on the story. I didn't quite buy it that Cline was fully inhabiting Alex's psyche - it felt to me more like she had met a high-class escort once or done some interviews - but, to be honest, I was looking to nitpick at the novel! Could easily imagine an intelligent reader feeling like her character worked perfectly.
She may very well have spoken to a real life Alex. I will say this. I started and soon put down her debut novel, The Girls. It didn't catch my interest. Randomly, since it seems we share some literary tastes, did you ever read A Calling For Charlie Barnes by Josh Ferris? I loved that book.
That's good to hear David! I thought Then We Came To The End was fabulous when I read it - probably the best contemporary American novel out there - and then it seemed like the light just went out for Ferris. The Unnamed and To Rise Again At A Decent Hour were total busts. But glad to hear that he recovered. Look forward to reading A Calling For Charlie Barnes.
Thank you Josh! Definitely feel aligned with you in terms of taste and sensibility. And glad somebody else sees through the smoke-and-mirrors of Vuong! I'm a bit baffled as to how his stuff has been praised as much as it has.
I've become really aware recently of how much reviews are an extension of the publishing industry and are written in a kind of code. Debut novels are always lauded, sophomore novels always trashed, prizes and accolades handed out on a certain kind of schedule in a writer's career, etc. n+1 had a good piece awhile ago digging under the hood of reviews and making clear the extent to which freelance reviewers are singing for their supper within the industry and so need to be very careful in aligning with standard tastes. I also don't really don't know, come to think of it, why reviews should be hosted in newspapers. Why is The New York Times the right venue for assessing literary work?
Hoping that the reviews here are a small part of some wider shift in taste - towards reviewers acting more as free agents and just saying very simply what they think of a work without worrying about offending.
- Sam
Loved Cline's 2016 novel, THE GIRLS. She's got major raw talent. Haven't read the new one but I should. I've been listening to interviews with Bowles; she sounds exactly on point, especially re the gaslighting, lying and denial which is de rigour of the New Left.
Have to read The Girls. Bowles is really smart and interesting. The concern with The Free Press is that it's becoming Republican auxiliary, but it's hard to argue with Bowles' critique of liberal institutions.
I’m always hesitant to disabuse you of your enthusiasm for Bari Weiss because you love her so much and why not? She’s a lovable goddess of wrath. So content to watch it burn. I could describe what I consider the true roots of her project because I literally watched her grow up and know her project is a family business. (By the way, I think you want to describe Nellie not as her sidekick but her wife and the mother of their children).
One of her ancestors was Harry Houdini, a debunker of myths but also a creator of his own. She follows a family tradition of being a gadfly at the dining table: buttressed by a wealthy and indulgent liberal family that her father Lou presided over, whose trick was regaling all in attendance with his over the top right-wing polemics that absolutely no one ever agreed with (“oh that’s just Lou being Lou - pass the lox please”) so I can see through the shtick that you may miss. Being right wing was attention seeking and it worked: it’s made her a fortune and allowed her to employ her family just as her grandfather and her father before her.
Bari’s lucrative Free Press, it’s a reckless feckless hollow version of the critique of late stage liberalism that others do more sincerely and thoughtfully. The Weiss version is stick em till they squawk then walk away with a gleam in your eye ! It’s rhetorical sport with zero consequences.
Nellie was dazzled - Bari was a charismatic and adored child and still to this day that’s the source of her power.
For Bari to walk away from the NYT was the sort of bravery of the bail bondsman - she was born into generational wealth and a deeply coherent Jewish community, surrounded by love and connection. She learned a craft and made money from it but there is nothing journalistic about it. Nothing is ever deeply researched there. It’s “feelings” based critique. She says stuff to “see what happens when I do”. Bari is not a journalist has no journalistic training (she studied education at Columbia and her first job in her early twenties - that dad Lou helped her get- was as an opinion writer for the WSJ) so to attribute any notion of authority to her work is the most maddening part of it all. Anyway, I do know you think the world of her and think she’s a brave journalist for going after the wokerati but that’s a dum project too. We actually do need to work on being a genuinely multicultural society where we share power with people unlike us. Does that result in missteps and hypocrisy? Yes, moving the culture forward is a messy project that the Free Press has zero interest in pursuing. Build new structures. Tell new stories. Invent the 21st century.
Agree with your thoughts on The Guest, the ending did not cohere and ruined what was otherwise an excellent novel
It's really a shame! I was expecting it to be like the novel-of-the-generation or something. I can't quite figure out if Cline just took a wrong pass at the ending or if it didn't come together because she wasn't fully inhabiting her character. I suspect the latter.
Thank you for both reviews, swallowed this post if one can say so-thank you, Sam
Thank you Chen!
....not sure you need this info, but started reading "The Guest" yesterday-for now seems what I sorely need these days-very engaging...thank you, I wouldn't know of the book if not for your review here
Great review of The Guest by Emma Cline. I just finished reading it: the ending was a letdown but the writing so mesmerizing, it wasn't about the story anymore but the crafting of sentences. Cline certainly is an outstanding stylist.
Thank you Petra! Yeah, I almost feel mean or something picking holes in anything in this book. She's the real deal as a writer and given all the ways publishing isn't really rewarding style at the moment it's great that she's getting the recognition that she is. Really liked your colors post btw!
Thanks Sam - that’s a compliment coming from you! You set the bar high here on Substack and your posts have inspired me to add more substance to my own.
Really appreciate it Petra!
I also enjoyed the Guest in that I found it very fascinating as opposed to very good. Your essay helped me understand why. Also, this line was so great: “like Catcher in the Rye if Holden were a hooker on painkillers.”
Thank you Anne! I was pleased with that line tbh. Loved the newlywed post. You're making me miss NY!
Did you leave recently? Or were you just visiting NYC when I met you at David’s?
I've lived most of my life in NY but am based in Central Asia now. Really nice to connect to the city through your posts!
I have to say about CHAZ, since I live near the site, that for it (as opposed to the immediate downtown protest) it WAS really a block party atmosphere during the day. I have pictures of my grandkids eating ice-cream there. And the deaths were never really established as done by the protestors. There were I think four, maybe three. One was of a guy who stole a jeep and ran it across the lawn INTO a bunch of protestors just sitting there. One of them shot him. The others were on the fringes--"in the neighborhood" but not in the park. Basically people walking by. One is thought to have been gang-related. (I'm operating from memory, here).
What escalated was at night. The problem with protests like this is that they attract the cuckoos, the disrupters, the thugs, who aren't in it for the protests. At one point, one NIGHT again, it got really out of hand and there was the attack on a precinct building. That occurred after the cops DID begin to crack down. But again, they never really established that the instigators were protestors. The other problem is the mob effect--the crowd phenomenon. Get enough people together who are angry but non-violent and small things set them off into things they wouldn't otherwise dream of doing. Yes, there was a lot of property damage, mostly to things like 7-11s.
One bit was the burning of cop cars. Rioters out of control, yes? Well, no. They caught the perp--it was one, an already disturbed woman from out of state who was wandering around and as far as I can tell not interested in the reason for the protests. She just wanted to burn things.
I'm not condoning mob action, obviously. But in volatile situations shit happens.
My problem with the word "woke" is that it is used as if those who hold its values should be treated as a lump. It used to be called PC, and THAT aspect of it went often too far --things like the "whiteness as octopus" language, or my particular bugaboo "trigger warnings" and to a lesser event "safe spaces." There is a grain of truth in some of those things--there IS white privilege but it is way more subtle than it is portrayed. Don't start me on male privilege--I am retired from a male-dominated profession--construction law-- and have many war stories about the absolute arrogance of men I encountered. Interestingly that came mainly from the lawyers, not the actual contractors I dealt with daily, particularly the small contractors. And some people are in fact already traumatized and find books that relate stories close to their experience upsetting. But again, it goes too far; people who haven't experienced trauma actually often THINK they have, and the trigger warning fad keeps them from reading things that HELP understand the roots of the trauma. My rule is that the only trigger warning I want to see is "the dog dies."
I'm not sure why a black guy owning a "1.4 million dollar home" is in need of an expose. Around here, that is a relatively cheap house. You think those in the black middle class don't encounter racism? Our former county Councilman was black: he has related how he was constantly being stopped by cops simply because he was going home to his nice middle class neighborhood. I doubt he was at CHAZ but I'm sure he was upset about what happened to George Floyd.
I'm glad she recognizes the good side of "wokeness" which is basically a matter of being aware and of exercising empathy; that's how pretty much all my friends are, and we are all elders who have watched and experienced first hand the things our country has gone through from the 50s onward. I think of the more extreme PC types, usually in college, as partaking in something like a large scale Instagram fad--all those dumb "challenges."
I consider myself left of center but not deeply "progressive." I agree with a lot of progressive ideals, but think specific policies can't be imposed until widely accepted; we have seen that kind of acceptance over the years from ending Jim Crow to gay marriage to broader healthcare.
My main bugaboo in life is overgeneralization---the drawing of conclusions from a few examples about a whole group and then condemning (or praising) the group. The Gaza war is RIFE with that kind of thing. It feels like our whole society, world wide, wants easy simple answers to everything and that just isn't how reality works.