Here is a contradiction the issue itself never resolves, so let me put it up front.
At 7 p.m. on November 18th, in the Breuer building Sotheby's bought for a hundred million dollars, an auctioneer opened bidding on a fully functioning eighteen-karat gold toilet at ten million dollars, made a series of toilet puns, and sold it to a single buyer, a "famous American brand." Jackson Arn, reviewing the scene for Issue 37, reportedly describes it as a moment of "genuine hope."
Now turn the page back to the editors' letter, which opens on the last chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups, telling his biographer, reportedly, that "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again," and that "After this nothing happened."
Most readers will treat these as opposite poles of the magazine—one a piece of art-market farce, the other a philosophical meditation on cultural death. They are not opposites. They are the same issue's front door and back door, and both ask the same question: what do you do when the world that made your acts meaningful is gone?
They are the same issue's front door and back door, and both ask the same question: what do you do when the world that made your acts meaningful is gone?
That question is the spine of Issue 37. Read the whole thing and it stops looking like a miscellany and starts reading like a single argument the editors may not have realized they were making.
The argument goes like this. The intellectual class has quietly given up on transforming its institutions, and has reorganized itself around two gestures instead: preservation and exit.
Start with the frame the editors chose. Their letter, "On Radical Preservation," takes its epigraph from Heidegger—"Language is the house of being… Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home"—and its dread from Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope.
Lear's subject is concept-loss. The Crow practice of "counting coups"—striking an enemy with a coup-stick, stealing a tied horse from a rival camp—lost its meaning the moment the tribe was moved onto the reservation and horse theft became a matter for local police. The word survived; the world that made it intelligible did not.
The editors' wager is that "merit" is our counting coups. Their stated worry is AI—that large language models could hollow out our guiding concepts until, someday, of our own culture too it might be said that nothing happened.
Take that diagnosis seriously, as they ask us to. Then notice that every other flagship piece in the issue is a variation on it—minus the chatbots.
Jeffrey Lawrence's "We Were the 99 Percent" is an elegy for Occupy, written by someone who was there in Tompkins Square Park in 2011 and, per his account, watched the slogan "We are the 99 percent" get built in an email chain. He dates his political formation to those months. He also asks what can be learned from a movement that "ultimately failed to deliver a political project strong enough to counteract" the surge of right populism that followed.
Lawrence's essay is a post-mortem on transformation. The dream of storming the institution is over; what he's now sifting for is what survives the wreck.
Franklin Eccher's "A Vital Education" is the exit door made literal. It's a report from the microcollege movement—Deep Springs, reportedly founded 1917, still serving 26 students at a time who milk cows and move irrigation lines twenty hours a week; and its newer imitators in Viroqua, Sitka, Gustavus.
The premise is not to reform Yale. The premise is to build a small, durable place somewhere the glaciers missed and let the seminar-of-equals survive there. Their conference venue was a community theater named, with no irony available to improve on it, Arkadia.
Then the art pieces. Sean Tatol's "After the Post-Avant-Garde" declares the autonomous downtown scene effectively dead—killed by an internet that made subcultures stop caring about their own criteria for what counts as cool. Arn's auction report withdraws into gleeful spectatorship, hoping, per his own telling, to see auctions dismantled canapé by canapé.
Preservation, elegy, exit, withdrawal. Four different rooms, one reflex.
And here is the tell that this is a season and not a coincidence. Reportedly, the same summer, Big Think shipped its third print issue, titled "The Opt-Out Nation."
When institutions fail, the literary-intellectual class no longer storms them. It curates arks. That's the shared move, and Issue 37 is a well-stocked ark: a first literature section in over a year, essays the editors praise for "inimitable curiosity and style" against a tide of writing they find "dutiful, programmatic and predictable."
The microcollege is the next station on that line: not the custodian inside the institution, but the one who has walked out to build a smaller institution he can actually keep.
So far, so coherent. Here is where the issue stops being able to decide what it is.
"Radical preservation" and the microcollege opt-out look like one thing from inside a functioning cultural inheritance and a completely different thing from anywhere else.
From inside, they are principled conservation. The Left Case for Great Books, reportedly argued in the previous issue, put it cleanly: a seminar becomes possible only when we "divest ourselves of the trappings of expertise and social hierarchy" and "meet and speak as equals." Guardianship. The house of being, maintained.
From outside, the same gesture reads as privilege—a chartered retreat for people who can afford to opt out of the institutions everyone else is still stuck negotiating. Deep Springs was free and, per E3, until 2018, all male; the Gustavus program Eccher visited was formerly "a Deep Springs College for women" that once didn't admit female applicants. The ark has always had an admissions policy.
Is preservation of "merit" and the seminar the last defense of intelligibility itself, or a lifeboat for the credentialed? The issue never answers. And to its enormous credit, it stages its own inability to answer more honestly than any argument could.
That staging is the scene at the center of Eccher's piece, and it deserves to be read as the issue's confession.
Fog grounds his flight to a "Rethinking Democracy and Education" conference. The organizers put the stranded participants on charter fishing boats. And Eccher finds himself in a lurching aluminum cabin for three hours, seasick, beside the former chair of his undergraduate program at Yale.
What nauseates him, he says, is "the collapsing distance between two worlds": the material world of rural, isolated Gustavus, and the "heady but no less vital world of liberal education and its stalwart defenders at places like Yale."
Yale on one side of the cabin. The rural microcollege on the other. Three hours of open water between them, and the writer physically sick at how close they've drifted.
That is the whole tension of Issue 37 rendered as a body in distress. The magazine wants the microcollege to be the honest alternative to Yale and cannot stop noticing that the boat is full of Yale.
Set that seasick cabin beside the gold toilet and you have the issue's two honest images. Arn calls the sale of America "genuine hope" precisely because he despises auctions and would love to see them dismantled; his optimism is a critic's revenge fantasy dressed as good news. Eccher calls the microcollege a reconciliation of two worlds while narrating, in the same breath, that he can't tell the worlds apart anymore.
Both are moments where the writer wants to believe in an exit and catches himself not quite believing.
The editors are right that concept-loss is the real stake—righter, maybe, than their AI framing lets them be. The question is whether "merit" and "the seminar of equals" are concepts worth guarding, or concepts already emptied out like counting coups, still spoken but no longer connected to the world that gave them force.
Plenty Coups could not say. He said that after the buffalo went away, nothing happened. Issue 37 cannot say either. It builds the ark, boards it, and stares out at the water, unsure whether it is saving the culture or merely saving itself—and, for once, does not pretend to know.
That not-knowing is the most intelligible thing in it.