marginal revolution read out: “Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.”
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marginal revolution read out. This episode covers the post “Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.” The post takes a contentious line from Sam Kriss and then sends readers to the longer conversation behind it.
The first linked piece is the passage that gives the post its title, “Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.” It is a brief but dense argument from Sam Kriss, quoted in the post, in which he says authenticity does not interest him because it is mainly a way of marketing subpar material: the work may not be good, but at least it is sincere. Kriss says you can often tell a book is going to be bad when the jacket copy calls it raw or unflinchingly honest. In his experience, writers who make a big show of authentically presenting themselves, warts and all, are usually portraying a different set of more interesting personality defects they wish they had. In person, he says, they are unbearable. The central line is that authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing, Kriss argues, is never authentic to the self, because a good writer has to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable. He borrows Virginia Woolf's phrase, the wedge-shaped core of darkness, and says that unknowable core is not something you can write autofiction about. The author notes that the passage comes from Sam Kriss and adds that there is more of interest at the link, on varied topics, with, in the author's phrase, some of the remarks being quite off. The author credits Isaac for pointing to it.
The second linked piece, which the post calls at the link, is the full interview 12 Questions for Sam Kriss, by Gordon Glasgow, published on September 25, 2026. It opens not with a conventional interview but with a knowingly invented parable. A dissatisfied vagabond writer travels the world in low season to stay solvent and complains constantly about how the weather and his environment prevent him from writing. In Cairo, amid late-March dust storms, he meets the well-read runaway daughter of the Sultan of Brunei, an autodidactic princess traveling toward the Red Sea. She listens to his complaints and then tells him to shut up. Suffering, she says, is inescapable, and the writer should simply observe it and write sentence after sentence. Style, she adds, is the summary of your flaws. The princess then pulls out an iPad, opens Substack, and shows him Numb at the Lodge, the newsletter of Sam Kriss. The parable describes Kriss as the greatest essayist of his generation, a self-hating Jew from Jerusalem with an Irish wife, living miserably and productively in London. The writer reads an article titled Everyone is Keir Starmer all night and declares the princess majestic.
Gordon Glasgow then shifts into personal nonfiction. He writes that he met Sam Kriss only once, in late January 2025, after a planned video interview with the artist Dean Kissick fell through because of a family accident. Glasgow had also just suffered the sudden death of his dog, Alfie, and was in no condition to film. He and Kriss met months later at Alley 41, a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens, chosen because Kriss wanted a particular type of noodle he said he could not find outside China. Glasgow describes the meal and the walk afterward, then the subway ride into the city. Kriss talked about seventeenth-century oriental alchemy while Glasgow squeezed a stress ball to manage anxiety. He began to resent Kriss a little, even though Kriss politely ignored the stress ball. Glasgow says talking to Kriss is like talking to an insanely curious, if irritating, seven-year-old savant. In one meeting, Kriss could move among Hiroshima, kitchen appliances, the national deficit, ancient Mayan ritual, Japanese botany, Finnish saunas, the economics of hair loss, and the specialized mining of African rubies. Glasgow compares him to a childhood camp acquaintance named Pegasus, a boy who knew more than everyone else and beat the counselors at chess, trivia, and geography.
After that meeting, Glasgow sent Kriss a list of fourteen questions to answer in essay form. Kriss sent back responses months later, but by then Glasgow's life had collapsed. He had returned to Madrid to write about his dog's death, then learned that his father was in septic shock and that his mother had been diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. He moved back to New York, worked as a courier, and spent his energy between his father's nursing home and his mother's chemotherapy. He stopped writing and read mostly old favorites: Houellebecq, Carrere, Ernaux, some Martin Amis. The piece ends with him saying that for comfort he reread those writers and had no interest in anything new, his pre-existing curiosity cut short by the year's events. That personal turn gives the interview a strange texture: the final answers are present, but they arrive after a year of loss, and the framing matters as much as the questions.
Taken together, the post sets up a tension. The first piece dismisses performed authenticity as a marketing trick, but the second piece is full of highly performed, self-conscious confession, both in the invented parable and in Glasgow's account of his own grief. The interview does not exactly resolve that tension, but it shows what Kriss means: raw confession alone is not enough, and the voice that matters comes from observation and form, not from parading the self.