Perhaps the strangest thing about Pluribus—Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s lauded new Apple TV series about humanity becoming infected by an extraterrestrial virus and  mentally united into a permanent groupthink-like state—is what it reflects. Released in 2025, the year of the great backlash against large language models (LLMs), all that critics and viewers have been able to talk about is how the series’ brainwashed, mentally “joined” humans, who are uniformly literal-minded and perfunctory, talk and behave exactly like ChatGPT.

We need not pretend that there is anything inherently subversive about free-standing paintings, not at a time and in a cultural milieu that seems willing to accept anything as art, whether stretched on custom strainers or duct-taped to the wall. What is, however, truly subversive (since the artworld seems intent upon that term) is a good painting—a few of which were on view last month in The Individualism of Dona Nelson at CANADA. 

These poems remind us how the literary past is always waiting for us in the literary future…