I got the sense that their entrepreneurial spirit had led them to the sort of scam that leads you to wear a shirt with a huge dollar sign on it alongside a number of similar young men willing to wear that same shirt, the type of scam that encourages you to work out with and find community among your new colleagues, the type of scam that answers the two dominant questions posed by the young American man in 2024: what will make this mean something, and how can I get rich as quick as possible?

I think young men have turned more conservative because “conservatism,” as it were, is the mode of politics that makes the most sense in Scam America, and these young men are the Scam Generation.

America has always been a nation of grifters, con men, and schemers; what’s different in Scam America is the scope and form. America in 2024 is not a fallen or crumbling empire; it is an enshittified product, a tired casino, a website losing ad revenue, a restaurant line full of private delivery drivers.

America is a casino now, and the young men voting for Trump are the sort of young men pounding free drinks at the blackjack table and toasting the pit boss. A vote for Trump is a vote for a cig inside, for another round, for the line to keep going up, up, up. Does that mean this configuration is permanent? Maybe, maybe not. Casinos are windowless so that you cannot tell the time; they pump in oxygen to keep you alert. They do this, of course, because their owners know that in time everybody loses. The young men of Scam America are not necessarily out of reach, but if the left wants any chance at swaying them, it should plan ahead to when party’s over and the hangovers kick in.

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.