Because I needed another project, we’re launching NewAds, a small, steady series of short posts keyed to the calendar—birthdays, publications, public performances, controversies, awards, reversals, and surprising footnotes. Call it a bit of advertisement: a way of practicing the intellectual life in public, one date at a time.
Mailer’s work—fiction and nonfiction alike—keeps asking: how does a writer live in history without being swallowed by it? He didn’t always answer well. Sometimes he answered spectacularly. Sometimes he answered offensively. But he never answered lazily.
So each month in 2026 we’ll publish up to four posts: brief vignettes with context, a quote or anecdote, and a question worth arguing about. When scholarship helps sharpen the picture, we’ll bring it in—not as a victory lap, but as a way of modeling what criticism can be: careful, curious, and alive.
If you’re reading along and have a favorite Mailer passage tied to a particular date—send it. We’ll build this calendar together.