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always comes first. Hey, podcast listeners. It's Anne Strain Champs here from To the Best of Our Knowledge.

And this week, we're bringing you a conversation with a young writer who's emerging as one of the great

intellectual voices of our time. He's already being compared to people like Susan Sontag

and Lionel Trilling, cultural critics with the intellectual breadth and curiosity to cover

everything from high art to pop culture.

So maybe you know him. His name is Mark Greif. He's been writing for 10 years or so, and some of his

essays are famous. He's written memorably about the crisis of policing, the tyranny of food

snobbery, the philosophical meaning of radio head, the rise and fall of the hipster, and his own inability to love hip-hop.

Yeah.

Weirdly, I saw all sorts of golden age hip-hop acts sort of by accident, and yet there was some barrier at the key moment when you kind of

make a decision, what will I really give my heart to in my teen years? Well, in hindsight, you think

those were world historical years. Here's this new art form being born. What's wrong with you,

fellow? You know, is it racism? Is it being afraid to leave your house and go someplace different?

Like, why didn't

you become a kind of hip-hop head, a white hip-hop head, which of course is itself embarrassing

as a stance? So there's a challenge in how far you can go. If you say, you know, what I really

want is not to be trapped in this horrible fiction of whiteness. Well, you are trapped in it, you know.

Mark Grife is one of the founders of the literary magazine N Plus One,

and he's just come out with a collection of his most influential essays called Against Everything.

It's a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

...