The special operation – codenamed “Web” – targeted four key Russian airbases: Belaya, Diaghilevo, Olenya and Ivanovo. The strikes damaged dozens of strategic aircraft used in bombing raids on Ukraine.
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International Press – Newsletter
DragonForce actors target SimpleHelp vulnerabilities to attack MSP, customers
The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
Threat Spotlight: Hijacked Routers and Fake Searches Fueling Payroll Heist
Dark Partners cybercrime gang fuels large-scale crypto heists
ConnectWise Confirms ScreenConnect Cyberattack, Says Systems Now Secure: Exclusive
Steal, deal and repeat: How cybercriminals trade and exploit your data
Websites selling hacking tools to cybercriminals seized
Malware
60 Malicious npm Packages Leak Network and Host Data in Active Malware Campaign
Inside a VenomRAT Malware Campaign
Fake Google Meet Page Tricks Users into Running PowerShell Malware
PyBitmessage Backdoor Malware Installed with CoinMiner
PumaBot: Novel Botnet Targeting IoT Surveillance Devices
GreyNoise Discovers Stealthy Backdoor Campaign Affecting Thousands of ASUS Routers
Hacking
Sugar-Coated Poison: Benign Generation Unlocks LLM Jailbreaking
The Sharp Taste of Mimo’lette: Analyzing Mimo’s Latest Campaign targeting Craft CMS
From Infection to Access: A 24-Hour Timeline of a Modern Stealer Campaign
Intelligence and Information Warfare
Mysterious hacking group Careto was run by the Spanish government, sources say
Russian hacker group Killnet returns with new identity
New Russia-affiliated actor Void Blizzard targets critical sectors for espionage
Russia-Aligned TAG-110 Targets Tajikistan with Macro-Enabled Word Documents
AIVD and MIVD recognize new Russian cyber actor
Chinese spies blamed for attempted hack on Czech government network
Mark Your Calendar: APT41 Innovative Tactics
Earth Lamia Develops Custom Arsenal to Target Multiple Industries
Lazarus Group Targets Crypto-Wallets and Financial Data while employing new Tradecrafts
Cybersecurity
The App Store prevented more than $9 billion in fraudulent transactions over the last five years
Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
Victoria’s Secret Website Taken Offline After Cyberattack
Massive data breach exposes 184 million passwords for Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and more
Treasury Takes Action Against Major Cyber Scam Facilitator
Integrity Reports, First Quarter 2025
Meta’s Adversarial Threat Report, First Quarter 2025
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“When conservatives discuss novels,” Christopher Scalia complains in his entertaining and useful 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), “we tend to mention the same handful of works. We cherish a reliable and sturdy stock that hasn’t been replenished in a generation or two”—a stock that includes The Lord of the Rings, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and, heaven help us, Atlas Shrugged.
It shouldn’t be that way. Conservatives should be widely read literary people. After all, we believe in beauty and the importance of remembering the past—and all writing is, in a strict sense, memorial. We believe in the inescapabilty of suffering—an idea present in every great work of literature or art. “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” W.H. Auden writes in “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “how well they understood / Its human position.” And we reject the idea—at least we used to—that politics can address life’s thornier problems, which are presented in literature as enduringly complex.
Yet, we also tend to focus on the tried and true (or, in this case, the read and true), which can make us risk-averse when it comes to literature. This is unfortunate, Scalia writes, because it obscures the “abundance of conservative ideals and principles in literature more broadly.” In short, it makes it seem that literature belongs to the left.
Scalia doesn’t obsess over the question of why conservatives read—or seem to read—so narrowly, and rightly so. (I suspect that conservative reading is broader than what is reflected in the literary references in our magazines or books.) After a short introduction, he gets right to recommending novels in a breezy style that is one of the book’s many pleasures. There is no moralizing about our duty—as citizens in a democracy!—to read difficult books, no browbeating for our louche reading ways. Instead, we have a brief summary of plot and context followed by a pithy discussion of a work’s key ideas and what makes the novel worth our time.
Scalia has a gift for capturing the most interesting elements of these novels in a short paragraph or a single sentence. Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas reminds us, for example, that “enduring … happiness requires well-ordered desire—we need to pursue something of value, and we need to have some goal beyond ourselves to feel satisfied.” Frances Burney’s Evelina suggests that “corrupt manners can have violent, degrading consequences while respect for civil behavior signals broader sympathy and concern for others.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance reminds us simply that “there are no new truths.” The book is an excellent introduction to these—and other—novels for readers regardless of political persuasion.
In addition to focusing on novels conservatives tend to ignore, Scalia has also limited himself to books originally published in English and works of so-called literary fiction. To include works in translation would have made the project unwieldly. “I … couldn’t imagine including Fyodor Dostoevsky,” Scalia writes, “without also inviting Alessandro Manzoni’s nineteenth-century masterpiece The Betrothed, or a contribution by Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, or one of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s controversial works.” The selections also reflect Scalia’s tastes, which are impeccable.
Some of the novels will be more familiar to conservative readers than others. You’ll find well-regarded favorites like Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley and P.D. James’s The Children of Men, but also other works that will be less familiar to some readers: V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts are perhaps two. Yes, Evelyn Waugh is included in the book, but Scalia rightly picks Scoop rather than Brideshead Revisited—a book most conservatives have already read. Scoop is not only one of Waugh’s best novels (my favorite is Decline and Fall, but Scoop is a close second), it is, Scalia argues, the best satire of the press in English: “no satires of the press remain as funny and relevant.”
Scalia provides discussion questions and a place for notes at the back of the book, but even more usefully, he includes an appendix titled “If You Liked … Try …” Here Scalia recommends even more novels. If you like Waverly, for example, Scalia suggests you give Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song a try. “Although it’s an unabashedly socialist work,” Scalia writes, “Gibbon’s novel (the first in a trilogy) is also a touching depiction of a fading agricultural life and the connections between tenant farmers and those who lived on the land before them.” If you like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, you should also read Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn. Other novels that Scalia recommends in this section include: Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lee Smith’s Oral History, Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and Charles Portis’s True Grit. As those titles show, this is a wonderful guide to reading more widely for those who are not regular readers of fiction.
Being well read is a good in itself, but reading widely can also show us, Scalia writes, that we have more in common than we sometimes think with “individuals who don’t seem to think like us.” How could it be otherwise?
13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read)
by Christopher J. Scalia
Regnery, 352 pp., $32.99
Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.
The post The Right Way To Read appeared first on .
Do you remember the year 2000? Twenty-five years on, I can barely recall all the fuss over “Y2K,” but I think it was around that time when, in an airport bookstore, I spotted a novel by a writer I hadn’t yet tried, Michael Connelly, though I’d seen reviews praising him. The book at hand, if memory serves, was Angels Flight, published in hardcover in 1999 and in paperback the following year. I bought it to read on the flight back to Chicago—and loved it. I promptly acquired his earlier novels (Angels Flight was his eighth), starting with the first one, The Black Echo, published in 1992, and I’ve read (and reread) all of the books that have appeared since then. I’m sure a lot of other readers would say the same thing.
The latest, Nightshade, published two weeks ago, is Connelly’s 40th novel. It introduces a new protagonist, an L.A. County police detective named Stilwell, who—just over a year before the action of Nightshade commences—blew the whistle on a colleague, Ahearn, who had manipulated evidence in a homicide case they were both working. The black mark against Ahearn didn’t get him fired, but it put a ceiling on his prospects for promotion. Meanwhile, unfairly, Stilwell is shifted from the county’s homicide desk to Catalina Island, a beautiful place but a far cry from the challenging urban setting in which he had thrived.
Stilwell misses his old job, but he has come to love Catalina, and—recently divorced—he has connected with a woman who has spent her entire life on the island: Tash Dano, the assistant harbormaster, eight years younger than Stilwell. He is beginning to feel at home there. But the discovery of a murdered woman’s body in the harbor—she’s been stuffed into a bag weighted with chains—rekindles his instinct for solving murders and achieving a measure of justice for victims.
Like two of Connelly’s signature protagonists, longtime LAPD detective and freelancer Harry Bosch and the much younger Renée Ballard (also an LAPD homicide detective), Stilwell has an unusually deep and intense empathy for those whose lives have been taken and a relentless drive to track down their killers. Connelly’s ability to create characters in this vein—and to connect them with one another—is surely one reason for his extraordinary success. After this first outing (oddly, in the entire book, Connelly never gives us the protagonist’s first name, a quirk I found mildly irritating), I am sure Stilwell will be a keeper.
Among many appealing qualities, Connelly’s generosity in acknowledging collaborators ranks high. He has often praised his longtime editor—justly so, no doubt. I feel as if in this book, though, she should have pushed back harder against one stylistic tic that grew increasingly irritating to me in the (mostly enjoyable!) course of reading. The bit I have in mind surfaces in the very first paragraph of the novel. The opening sentence mentions the thousand-foot “marine layer” over the entrance to the harbor. A bit further into the paragraph, we read: “Stilwell knew that as soon as the layer burned off, the weekenders would start arriving.” Nothing there to stumble over. Then, at the beginning of the second paragraph, we encounter this: “His answer was punctuated by a foghorn from somewhere inside the layer. Stilwell knew by the tone that it was the Catalina Express about to come through the shroud.” This repetition of “Stilwell knew” was a little burr that briefly interrupted my absorption in the narrative. Did Connelly intend to emphasize just how observant, etc., Stilwell is as a rule?
I quickly got back into the flow of the narrative—but then, a few pages later, I came to a paragraph that begins “Stilwell knew the stages of decomposition in cold water” and concludes with another sentence beginning “Stilwell knew.” Yes, really. And for the rest of the novel, the refrain (sometimes with slight variations: “Stilwell nodded. He knew…”) was both an irritant and a distraction, sometimes generating mini-parodies in my mind. So it goes. This didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book, which features an all-too-convincing villain (arrogant to the nth degree) and (as is typical of Connelly’s fiction) a rich variety of minor characters in an intriguing setting. I am already looking forward to Stilwell’s next outing.
Nightshade
by Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pp., $30
John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, The American Conservative, and other outlets.
The post There’s a New Cop on Catalina appeared first on .
She is not the protagonist one would root for—adulterer, opportunist, sexual masochist, foulmouth, backslider, self-loather, abuser of mind-numbing substances. Yet by the last line of her memoir, journalist Laurie Woolever commands respect thanks to her profundity and sheer, clear-eyed self-awareness.
Fans of the late Anthony Bourdain know her as his coauthor (Appetites: A Cookbook and World Travel: An Irreverent Guide) and assistant before his suicide in 2018. Followers of certain #MeToo offenses remember her previous employ with chef-restaurateur Mario Batali, whose two sexual misconduct lawsuits would eventually be settled out of court. To appreciate how Woolever landed positions with both megawatt personalities, she begins her story as a 22-year-old college grad ISO who’s come to NYC.
The journey is relatable, with poverty wages, bed bugs, and morning bong hits. She cooks for the very rich until the lure of a professional chef’s life draws her to culinary school. There, she soon “took correction as a personal referendum on what a complete idiot I was, how unsuited for this hard, hot kitchen life.”
This was in the 1990s brand of celebrity chefdom; Food Network was new and instructional. Woolever is fired from her first official culinary gig the day before she receives her diploma. By the time Batali hires her at Babbo, his hotspot in the West Village, she favors a career writing about food rather than cooking it.
Woolever had been journaling along the way, in effect honing her literary skills. That is surely one reason this account of Batali’s behavior is specific: He pats the seat of their shared cab and says, “Slide those thighs on over.” She plops her bag between them and thinks: “Had he really expected me to fucking cuddle with him in the first five minutes of my first day on the job? He was testing my boundaries.”
Nonetheless, she admits at age 25 being “excited by the proximity to power, money, charismatic and attractive new friends, endless booze, and rich food.” Batali promises her access to food editors, leering: “They’re all on my dick, trying to get a reservation. Access is power, baby.”
When he squeezes Woolever’s backside later on, she calls him on it but then laughs it off. Why? The fact that the chef harassed his female employees was being tolerated, and Batali had opened those editorial doors for her. Woolever’s writing chops soon earn bylines in Wine Enthusiast and the Los Angeles Times.
He does toss her back into the kitchen for a time, and she enjoys the rush. “Work fast, work clean, make it flawless,” she writes. “Cooking this way was a form of controlled danger, risk … and also, very much about sex.” After work, she drinks to stupor levels with cooks and waiters, gets hung over regularly, and sleeps around. Care and Feeding’s prose does not flinch from noting how many times the author vomits or what she upchucks into.
Batali also recommends her to Bourdain, a chef in search of a recipe maven for his brasserie cookbook. She describes him at their first meeting as self-effacing and warm. At this point, Woolever had been cycling through jobs, including as online editor for Wine Spectator.
She meets her future husband online. Their relationship turns out to be complicated and unsatisfactory for her libido. She scratches that itch elsewhere, which will lead to their divorce. Still an addict, Woolever fondly remembers the morphine drip she receives after the Caesarean birth of their son and painfully revisits the new motherhood terrors that follow.
So she is grateful when Bourdain offers her his assistant post. “Tony treated me like a person with inherent value and paid me on time,” she says. “I felt lucky and glad.”
He gets her to join Twitter—reposting her first tweet and earning her an immediate throng of followers. He connects her with his pals at Lucky Peach. He invites her to join his television crew on a shoot in Vietnam, where she slurps a bowl of Bun Bo Hue, the spicy beef and pork noodle soup Bourdain calls “the greatest in the world.” They collaborate on a second cookbook, this time as coauthors.
Woolever admits that she admires, and is envious of, Bourdain’s “public-facing” life. Privately, she watches as he frees himself from his first marriage, achieves crazy fame, falls in love hard, and suffers for it. Knowing his fate, reading the final 60 or so pages of Care and Feeding is akin to witnessing Bourdain lumber toward the edge of a cliff.
It is here that Woolever is especially masterful at delaying the denouement by juxtaposing it with what happens in her life. Her son playing Little League and the #MeToo reportage that involves Bourdain’s girlfriend forces Woolever to reexamine the Batali era (and go on the record, albeit anonymously). Her own marriage ends ugly.
She grieves for Bourdain yet feels undeserving of those who express their sympathy for her, because she also says that she should have recognized his pain. Ongoing therapy, a measure of sobriety, and clarity of purpose put the author on the road to redemption.
Care and Feeding: A Memoir
by Laurie Woolever
Ecco, 352 pp., $29
Bonnie S. Benwick, formerly of the Washington Post Food section, is a freelance editor and recipe tester. You can find her on Instagram and Threads: @bbenwick.
The post On Benders, Batali, and Bourdain appeared first on .
If you’ve ever been out for dinner in Manhattan, the name of the restaurateur Keith McNally will undoubtedly be familiar to you. Best known as the owner of the celebrity haunt Balthazar—a New York re-creation of a Parisian bistro that is packed to capacity night after night, and has been since it was opened in 1997—English immigrant McNally has established a reputation in his nearly five decades in the restaurant business as a two-fisted, combative but largely beloved figure. He broke through into the wider public consciousness a few years ago when he publicly banned the actor James Corden from Balthazar for being rude to his staff, then rescinded the ban after Corden apologized to him, before reinstating it after deciding that Corden hadn’t been contrite enough.
There were few books this year that I was looking forward to reading more than McNally’s memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. I had expected it would be a gloriously delicious tasting menu of his famous diners’ indiscretions, served up with a side order of McNally’s own buccaneering career through the fleshpots, bars, and speakeasies of Manhattan. Even though the entrepreneur had a near-fatal stroke in 2016 that left his right side paralyzed and his speech badly impaired, his hugely popular, endlessly witty Instagram account suggested that McNally was as talented a raconteur as he was a restaurateur. By rights, readers should have been in for a three-course feast of an autobiography.
That the book isn’t at all what was anticipated is clear from its first sentence: “In early August 2018, I tried to commit suicide.” Describing in unsparing detail the mental and physical collapse that took place after his stroke, McNally, tiring of a painful and often humiliating existence, decided to end the misery he felt by taking a massive overdose of pills. Discovered by one of his sons, he was committed firstly to hospital, and then to a psychiatric institution for therapy. While there, he began to explore the idea of committing his thoughts to his typewriter, which he did slowly and laboriously, using his good hand to do so. I Regret Almost Everything is the result, and even the most sympathetic of readers will regret that this is a book so clearly influenced by trauma, rather than triumph.
The first third of the book contains its two most jaw-dropping revelations: firstly, the suicide attempt, and secondly, McNally’s account of a love affair that this otherwise heterosexual man embarked upon with the playwright Alan Bennett, when Bennett was aged 35 and McNally was 18. The two had met when McNally, who briefly worked as a boy actor, had appeared in Bennett’s 1968 satirical play Forty Years On. The relationship, which began as that of mentor and student, eventually developed into something else, although McNally is quick to note, “While I loved Alan, the attraction was never physical, and our nights together were more intimate than passionate.”
That sound you hear—somewhere between a cough and a snort—is that of a thousand aspirant Bennett biographers receiving the first thing that amounts to a proper scoop that has occurred for decades during the playwright’s lifetime. But if you’re expecting to read a damning account of the private life of a much-loved British icon, you’ll be disappointed. McNally has remained friends with Bennett (who was an investor in his first restaurant Odeon, presumably cashing in quite significantly) ever since, and deals with the anticipated issues of exploitation and the like robustly. (It will come as little surprise that McNally is no supporter of the #MeToo movement, seeing it as an assault on free speech, and is a stout defender of Woody Allen.)
Thereafter, you’re agog for more high-end celebrity gossip, but you will be waiting for a long time if so. There is an account of Bill Cosby visiting McNally’s nightclub Nell’s, insisting on no special treatment, and then writing McNally “an incredibly nasty letter … complaining about the rude service he’d been subjected to.” McNally therefore writes, “I’d never found Cosby funny before, but after this I found him absolutely repugnant.” Fair enough. There is a heavily redacted, inconsequential account of his short-lived affair with a well-known television star in the ’90s, and Corden-gate is briefly discussed toward the close (mainly in the context of how pleased McNally was that it raised his Instagram following). But, once again, if you’re after filth and scandal, you will be disappointed. There is one central target in this book, and it is Keith McNally himself, who does not emerge well in the slightest.
McNally is open about his lack of conventional education, and he has been fortunate enough to have befriended many of the cleverest intellectuals in Anglophone society. After all, even the smartest of people want to be fed, and fed well. Following his association with Bennett—who presumably has given his blessing to the exposure of their relationship in this book—he formed another bond with Bennett’s Beyond the Fringe castmate Jonathan Miller, and later went on to have similarly close associations with Tom Stoppard and David Hare, “a writer whose plays are often accused of lacking heart.” Yet he has no illuminating anecdotes from his acquaintance with these people, just as, when he met Picasso’s muse Françoise Gilot, “I was so captivated by Gilot’s expressive, birdlike face that I didn’t take her stories in and, as a consequence, have no memory of them.”
McNally has the passion of the autodidact, and I Regret Almost Everything is rich in literary allusion, from Auden and Orwell to Kierkegaard and Somerset Maugham. Yet the quotations that ostentatiously trumpet his learning seldom lead to greater illumination, and the author often opens himself up to charges either of poor editing or misjudgment. It is unfortunate that, on one page, he boldly declares that both he and his brother abhor cliché, and that on the next, he describes someone as being “bald as a coot.”
As a writer, McNally is serviceable without being inspired, and I often wondered what a Jay McInerney (whose first novel Bright Lights Big City famously used an image of the Odeon on its cover) or Christopher Hitchens would have done with his admittedly extraordinary life story. This is a book that should be energetic and vibrant, a colorful and amphetamine-level rush, like the famous tracking shot in Goodfellas committed to paper. Instead, it’s more like being served the set menu in a half-empty establishment where the waiter dolefully tells you his unhappy life story along with the specials. It isn’t that it’s without its charms—the descriptions of McNally’s construction of his restaurant empire, and their day-to-day operations, have a focus and detail that makes them truly fascinating to read—but it’s a curiously unhappy and constrained book that belies its creator’s vigor and obvious intelligence.
Had I wished to bum a free meal from McNally, I would simply have praised I Regret Almost Everything, but I suspect that this most outspoken of figures detests an ass-kisser. Besides, it’s not worth lying for the sake of a complimentary steak frites at Balthazar. You finish the book not thrilled by a grand life well-lived, but feeling sorry for its author. Somehow, I don’t think that was what the publisher was expecting when they commissioned it. McNally has already suggested on Instagram that he is unhappy with this version of the memoir, and has even asked purchasers not to buy it until the inevitable reprint. It would be rude not to obey his wishes and hold off, in the hope that a better, more interesting account of a remarkable existence awaits.
I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir
by Keith McNally
Gallery Books, 310 pp., $29.99
Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin’s Press).
The post A Mediocre Meal of a Memoir appeared first on .
In 2012, the Tumblr blog “Nice Guys of OKCupid” spotlighted a now-familiar archetype: the self-proclaimed “nice guy” whose progressive, sensitive façade masks entitlement, resentment, and self-absorption. Matt Gasda’s new novel, The Sleepers, animates a pretentious, Ivy League version of this archetype. Set in Brooklyn, it follows Dan—a hyper-online, upwardly mobile academic—steeped in some of the central tensions of the millennial era.
The year is 2016, and Dan is dating the beautiful but “aging” actress, Mariko, a Tisch graduate whose stagnant performances are precise but uninspired. (“Aging” in quotes because she’s only 32, yet frets over her supposed crow’s feet and fading glow.) As the 2016 election simmers in the backdrop—notifications humming ambiently across Twitter and Facebook—The Sleepers unfolds, saturated in paradox.
Perhaps the most central of those: that so-called male feminists often make the worst boyfriends—their performative wokeness a Trojan horse for ego, entitlement, and resentment. But subtler paradoxes surface, too: that Mariko, the neurotic older sister, is less professionally successful than her free-spirited sibling, Akari; that Dan, a proto-“Social Justice Warrior” online, yawns at the suffering of individuals in real life. There’s also the paradox that the meritocratic hamster wheel he builds a brand critiquing is his only source of meaning. And that his separation from it is only possible through the patrimony of a father whom he scorns, both in the abstract (deeming the nuclear family an “overrated configuration”) and the concrete (his unwillingness to be a decent, communicative son).
I think—but am not always sure—that the novel is satirizing Dan. So many of his lines are cringe-inducing, with surrounding characters viscerally recoiling. Like when Mariko suggests a movie night, and he retorts that he only watches “Lars von Trier films.” Or, when trying to be seductive, he drops the hilariously corny line: “I like your soul. It’s pretty fucking fascinating slash amazing,” using the Reddit-brained, theatre-kid convention of saying “slash” out loud. There’s also his absurd insistence that the New York Times isn’t elitist enough. But this isn’t just performative pedantry. It’s a self-absorbed strategy to talk about himself when he should be focused on his girlfriend. “He wanted to talk about himself, examine himself before her: his ideas, politics, habits, his soul,” the narrator explains. “This was part of the ruse: he would inquire into her inner life, really, her moral life, only so that he could feel justified in talking about his own.” Dan is, in so many ways, an abhorrent, repulsive, narcissistic character—the embodiment of everything people hate about millennials—which the novel captures brilliantly.
But sometimes it’s hard to tell: Some of the qualities it parodies—aimlessness, overthinking, faux profundity—are qualities from which it itself suffers, taking its meanderings too seriously, and treating every intellectual ramble like a revelation. Maybe that’s the point? Maybe it’s a method performance—both mocking and embodying the preening it critiques? It’s a little too on-the-nose, too neurotic, or just in need of reining in.
Take, for example, Mariko’s overwrought monologue about “this fucking bizarre American obsession with happiness.” It’s melodramatic in a way that expresses “main-character energy”—not on Mariko’s part, but of the novel itself. She proceeds to lament the loss of childhood contentment, remarking, “I’ve never been able to compensate for the love that I had then—that feeling that earth itself is love.” Earth itself is love? Did Rupi Kaur write this?
If these lines are satire, the novel doesn’t do enough to make that clear. There’s too little authorial distance, in a way that’s confusing rather than clever. The blur between parody and participation, between what’s being mocked versus modeled, undermines trust in authorial control—making the novel seem a little too proud of its own self-awareness and leaving the reader unsure whether it’s in on the joke, or simply embodying it.
Still, the story is potent. Dan isn’t just a hilariously narcissistic millennial “gooner“—he’s also, like most of us, complicated. Beneath the cringe and melodrama are moments of gripping sympathy for the Greek nature of his tragic arc.
Centrally, there’s the realization that so much of Dan’s dysfunction stems from cultural narratives he’s internalized—primarily the idea that masculinity is toxic—and the consequences of living in a society that perpetuates such distortions. Case in point: Most of the female characters, on a psychosexual level, crave male leadership and dominance. Eliza pursues a teacher, and Mariko, an older director—both authority figures. Dan, passive and submissive, fails to “wear the pants,” and what seems like sensitivity ultimately becomes repellant and toxic, the most destructive force in the novel.
The story also evokes James Joyce’s Ulysses. Like Leopold Bloom, Dan wanders an iconic urban setting (Brooklyn instead of Dublin), shifting interchangeably from loftiness (politics, memory, literature) to bodiliness (breakfast, sex, sweat, excrement). Like Leopold, he grieves a parent’s suicide, while tethered to a stage-performer woman associated with menstruation and fertility. But whereas Ulysses ends in affirmation—Molly’s redemptive “yes” to new life with Leopold—Dan’s story reflects the brutal entropy of postmodernism, gently reminding disillusioned readers that commitment, care, and continuity might be worth considering after all.
Ultimately, The Sleepers is a welcome elegy for “bugmen” and a reflection of the growing sentiment that marriage and family are the new counterculture. These are fitting contributions from a writer whom Vulture called the “dramatist of the Dimes Square scene”—a contrarian, post-left subculture of crypto edgelords, aspiring tradwives, and Bell Curve enthusiasts. Fittingly, Gasda’s reactionary portrayal of #MeToo—and the spiritual fallout of a culture that pathologizes masculinity—is sharp, if flawed. The novel is excessive at times, with monologues as tedious as its characters. But it’s a bold, messy, and oftentimes brilliant meditation on the shortcomings of post-liberation. Here’s hoping we’re emerging from that wreckage—and that Gasda will bring his sparkling dramatization to whatever comes next.
The Sleepers: A Novel
by Matthew Gasda
Arcade, 288 pp., $27.99
Nora Kenney is a writer and communications director in New York.
The post Toxic Emasculinity appeared first on .
