Jared Marcel Pollen

Jared Marcel Pollen is the author of The Unified Field of Loneliness. His work has appeared in LARB, Tablet, Liberties, and 3:AM. His debut novel, Venus&Document, will be published in spring 2022.

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9 Posts

Piketty’s Progress

A review of A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press, 288 pages (April 2022) As I write this, the city of Rotterdam is considering a request to dismantle one of its historic bridges to grant Jeff Bezos’s super-yacht (too monstrous for normal ports) safe passage to

Jared Marcel Pollen

28 Apr 2022 · 10 min read

A World of Waste, Stripped of Transcendence: James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ at 100

Few novels become institutions, to have departments rigged up around them, whole constituencies and spheres of scholarship, as works of lifelong study, fascination and confusion. Ulysses, whose publication centenary will be observed on February 2nd, is one such book. Like Marx’s Kapital, Joyce’s door-stopping opus has kept academics

Jared Marcel Pollen

31 Jan 2022 · 13 min read

‘Woke Racism’—A Review

How will dropping to one’s knees and admitting one’s privilege end the mass incarceration of black Americans caused by the disastrous failure of the War on Drugs?

Jared Marcel Pollen

26 Oct 2021 · 12 min read

Mrs. Dalloway: Secularism and Its Enchantments

Woolf’s depiction of these inner rhythms would be refined in the novels that followed—To the Lighthouse and The Waves—but Dalloway was the true birth of this form.

Jared Marcel Pollen

2 Sep 2021 · 13 min read

Blessed Are the Sense-Makers

Years from now, if anyone looks at a line graph (in the OED or Google dictionary) tracking the frequency with which a word is mentioned in print, they may notice the current affinity for the word “narrative.” An already overworked word (by virtue of its abstractness), it is now almost

Jared Marcel Pollen

5 Jul 2021 · 11 min read

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe—A Review

A review of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson. Allen Lane, 496 pages (May 2021) Viewed from a certain angle, history appears to be the legacy of our errors—the record of humanity risking too much and anticipating too little, getting things wrong and getting them wrong all

Jared Marcel Pollen

6 May 2021 · 10 min read

Oscar Wilde’s Utopia

The great conflict within the Left during the 19th century was between anarchist and statist visions for socialism (this was the bone of contention between Bakunin and Marx, and for many revolutionaries long after).

Jared Marcel Pollen

12 Feb 2021 · 11 min read

Oscar Wilde’s UtopiaOscar Wilde’s Utopia

The novel’s composition is a bit cobbled, which Amis acknowledges when he says that he pities the reviewer who has to cross the whole thing front-to-back, recommending instead that the book be taken up at random and read in leaps and snatches.

Jared Marcel Pollen

25 Sep 2020 · 9 min read

The Right Side of History—A Review

The time may soon come when a more sophisticated neuroscience will render arguments of morality and free will effectively null.

Jared Marcel Pollen

28 Mar 2019 · 11 min read