Just Read Sam Kriss
A decade ago I wouldn’t have been so sure, but now it’s a slam dunk. Sam Kriss is our language’s greatest living satirist.
Prove me wrong.
Really. Know of any contenders? Anyone who matches Kriss in either breadth of knowledge or excruciating befuddlement? The guy mines every hillside on every continent, and still can’t tell you why we bother to dig in the earth. There’s a supreme anthropological hubris that smacks right up against: “Face it, we don’t know what the fuck is going on here.”
Such grasp combined with such humility makes Kriss’ pitch-perfect satire possible. Not easy snark, but hard-earned wonderment.
Politically, Kriss skewers both left and right, especially the louder voices. But he’s rarely bitter. He can celebrate while mocking and mock while celebrating, and his own voice isn’t immune.
Kriss is a rare thing to have arisen out of 20th c. leftism. Reading the Marxist canon and its offshoots, he ended obsessed with the way theoretical constructs misshape reality. Since he's funny as hell, and a polymath, we end up with his brilliantly warped broadsides.
ALL online. Kriss doesn't publish books. Which makes me think someone needs to be archiving the best of this work, putting it on paper. All of it could easily disappear.
Kriss would laugh at this, I know. “Laser etch it in titanium and it'll disappear too.”
But this is some of the best writing of the recent decade. There should be a couple collections in print, at least. The Kriss corpus shouldn’t remain stuck in the digital muck, only to blink out when our current MO does.
I write this after reading his recent “Where Babies Come From”. Go read it. I don’t often accept Kriss’ concluding formulas, as here again, but so what? The mix of history and fabrication is just right, as often.
Kriss first grabbed my attention with a piece on his old blog Idiot Joy Showland. He was mostly snarking, but “The Momo signal” named something about the digital I’d known all along, but couldn’t have put into plausible fake news, i.e. myth.
Where would we be without fake news? There wouldn’t be any we to speak of.
You can make of that what you will.
Kriss’ articles appear here and there, so any search will call up worthwhile rants, but his Substack offers many of the best of them.
As a Westerner living long-term in Taiwan, thus half in Mandarin, I can attest that his 2023 piece on the Chinese language hit on just the things that make Chinese borderline invincible. And here’s the thing: he doesn’t even speak Chinese.
Just read him. Subscribe to his Substack. Your money doesn’t go many better places than sending this guy around with his spade and tools. Don’t give a dime to Hollywood. Give something to Sam.
A few more for the archive:
Exactly!
+1 on the Taylor Swift piece especially.
There will come a day when Sam justifies the Israeli occupation and eventual ethnic cleansing.
That piece isn't "brutally honest"; it's just standard liberal anti-political bullshit.
Israeli support for EVERTYTHING the IDF is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is overwhelming. That includes shoving things up the asses of Palestinians brutalized by Israeli soldiers.
Sam also tends to call this clearcut case of genocide/ethnic cleansing/mass murder a "war".
It's not a war. Unless of course, the genre is satire.