My New Book, Blank Space, is Out Today

I wrote — perhaps “inadvisably” — a cultural history of the first 24.5 years of the 21st century

My third book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, is out today from Viking Books. (If you're in NYC, I'm doing an event tonight with Greenlight Books and Emily Sundberg, and one tomorrow in Boston/Cambridge at Harvard Book Store with Prof. Josh Lambert.)

I had originally conceived my previous book, Status and Culture, to be two books: the first one would lay out the fundamental social principles behind cultural change, and the second would explain how the 21st century altered the parameters of that model. That second book got crammed into a single chapter of Status and Culture, and I felt there was much more to say. But rather than looking at contemporary culture as if it's been static since 2001, I thought it was better to go back and examine the specific timeline to chart the specific moments that brought us to where we are now. Yes, there is a thesis to the book about the lack of creative invention, but ultimately Blank Space serves as a linear history of 2001-2025.

I ended up writing the book over 11 months last year in order to get it out in 2025, so that we could look back at the state of culture. My window for final edits closed this spring, which explains why the story ends after Trump’s second inaugural. (I apologize to the members of The Velvet Sundown for not being able to tell their underdog story.)

As a kid, I loved magazines, books, and documentaries that covered a single decade, whether it was the decaying Life magazine issue about the Eighties I found in some storage boxes or my Dad's hardcover copy of Halberstam’s The Fifties (a book that curiously has no central thesis nor chapter titles). More recently I enjoyed Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties for the same reason. 

So it’s been a surprise how few look-backs the Aughts and Teens (?) inspired. Earlier this year Colette Shade published an excellent personal take on the turn-of-the-century Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything. And Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online put the chaos of internet culture into a clearer historical narrative. Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, which came out in 2010, subtly served as an Aughts musical history, and Anna Kornbluh's important Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism applied Fredric Jameson's useful ideas about post-modernism and capitalism to recent literature and film.

But there hasn't been a straight linear pop history of these years, for a few obvious reasons. First, there is an unspoken norm among cultural critics to avoid “big” synthesis books, almost as if “the end of grand narratives” was not so much a description of post-modernism but a moral commandment. More directly, the entire 21st century has felt like a big blur. The speed and superficiality of cultural change has obscured the larger shifts in social values, and decade-long markers stopped being useful. (Pre- and post-smartphone is probably the best divider.)

But reading Klosterman’s Nineties made me realize that our fundamental cultural values have changed in the last three decades, and it would be useful to at least catalog these changes as they relate to the major economic, technological, and ideological developments of the last 25 years. In thinking about our era, I kept coming back to a single profound shift: Tastemakers are now unabashedly pro-commerce, and in parallel, quite skeptical about the importance of radical artistic invention. This may have started as an aesthetic pendulum swing away from 1990s earnest liberal "indie" values, but the warm embrace of financial success in pop culture had stuck around because of strong ideological roots. There seems to be something discriminatory about telling people that their favorite entertainment isn't "art" and unfair to chastise entertainers for attempting to maximize their earnings.

Many of the early book reviews summarize book under the clickbait that I'm saying that "everything is bad now," which is not my point at all. Culture has had an incredible 25 year run — as entertainment, as money-making, and as a vehicle for politics. And of course, there were great moments of pop culture from Beyoncé's "Formation" to Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal that will stand the test of time. But the century's most representative creators and cultural products have not ushered in radical aesthetic changes.

Early in the writing process, China Talk’s Jordan Schneider suggested I read Only Yesterday, a book about the 1920s written in 1931. This ended up being an unofficial goal for the project: a cultural history drafted in the immediate aftermath to capture the feelings of the time. This should not be and will not be the final cultural history of 2001-2025, and the future twists and turns of history will change how we think about these years. (A clear example of this principle is John Ganz’s great When the Clock Broke about 1990s fringe conservatism, which would have been a quite marginal subject in 2001 but has become crucial for explaining our current politics.) 

I jumped into writing the book not quite knowing how I would feel about it, and it was hard to avoid being negative in a time marked by AI slop, premium mediocre, enshittification, cryptocurrency counterculture, blind-box consumerism, the manosphere, and celebrities' with a near-monopoly hold on the discourse.

But the point is also that we're not condemned to any of this. There was a lot of bad culture in previous eras, but small groups just went off and did their own thing. What they didn't do is simply lower their expectations to align with the market winners. Blank Space can be, as the Economist describes, "punchy," because I hold the strong conviction that art that can expand human consciousness and fulfill important social roles other than temporary distraction. I understand the impulse to delegitimize any critique of contemporary culture as curmudgeonly, but could someone really write a book about how 21st century culture is best of all possible cultures? The Jake Paul-Mike Tyson match was one of the most watched pop culture moments in recent years. Will that inspire heroic biopics in the future?

But the history, no matter how bleak, is there to point us to better solutions and actions. In writing this book, I've only deepened my belief that creative invention is a social good, and we must intervene to make sure radical creators are given more attention, support, and validation. Whether you agree with that point or not, Blank Space still functions as an easy way to reflect on what's happened in these quite-hazy years. I hope you enjoy.