There’s a lot of discussion flying back and forth as to whether we’re in a period of cultural stagnation. Obviously you need to heavily discount the possibility of “old fogeyism” and reactionary nostalgia whenever you make such claims, and historically a lot of them have been totally false, but the one argument I have found convincing that we’re not in a good cultural place right now is the difficulty of coming up with such a work.

What work captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s and so far of the 2020s? I certainly can’t think of any novels that did it, far too much of that literary decade was about self-obsessed New Yorkers and had no relevance to anyone else. None of the reactions against it (i.e. Dimes Square) produced anything of lasting note either.

The Social Network movie?