Becca Rothfeld
Story Stream
Toward a Sordid Utopia? March 12, 2025
The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever unders...
A Business Doing Pleasure with You December 11, 2024
There are nefarious forces at work in the sphere of taste. Dislike and possibly judgment itself have been outlawed. Phalanxes of stans stand ready to dox critics and unbelievers. Haters are held at post-point until they recite, and believe, that arti...
Year in Reading December 04, 2024
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: this year, my debut book was published, but I also contracted thyroid cancer and a number of autoimmune ailments, which ranged from aggravating to genuinely alarming. Suddenly, my life was an exerc...
In Praise of Excess June 04, 2024
There’s something deeply human about the biblical story of King David offering to build a palace for God. Like David, we all desire to grasp the infinite, to build something so grand that it reflects some of what heaven must look like. But David’s su...
On Becca Rothfeld’s “All Things Are Too Small” May 31, 2024
IN AN INFLUENTIAL essay on the aesthetic values of minimalism and maximalism in literature, the late John Barth jokes that “[t]he oracle at Delphi did not say, ‘Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of one’s own psyche may be prerequisite to an under...
Not Even the Warping Kind May 10, 2024
I haven’t spoken to my mother since 2017, and it has been a good deal longer than that since I have ventured back to my childhood home, an unremarkable brick house with a shrieking red door in the northwest quadrant of Washington, DC. I don’t miss my...
An Interview With Book Critic Becca Rothfeld March 06, 2024
I first met Becca Rothfeld when I pitched her back at the end of 2020. She had just joined The Point Magazine as a contributing editor, but I reached out because I loved her essay “Same As It Ever Was,” published in a magazine called Cabinet. The pie...
