Calling all hollaback girls and sk8er bois who want to bring the sexy back. You’re invited to my early-two-thousands-themed party! It’s going to be bootylicious.

“Legally Blonde” will be playing on a loop; an iPod shuffle will be blasting the Strokes; and there will be zero discussion about how none of us have a mortgage yet, even though we all know we probably should, because property is a sound investment, especially at our age.

So set your AOL Instant Messenger status to “Away” and come get ur freak on. Let’s all dance like we’re still covered by our parents’ health-insurance plans!

And there goes my shirt up over my head!

That’s right, it’s going to get hot in herre. And I’m not talking about the anthropogenic climate change we weren’t as cognizant of in the early two-thousands, even though scientists had been warning us for decades. I’m talking about body heat generated by us dancing to Nelly, ha ha. (Bonus points if you rock the Band-Aid!)

Of course, I do understand that not all guests will be able to shake it like a Polaroid picture. So, for anyone bringing along their little ones, there’s a quiet room at the back of the apartment with toys to keep them occupied and freshly made beds if they get a lil sleepy. 🙂

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YOU’VE JUST BEEN PUNK’D!

No babies allowed because, as of around mid-2017, I feel a strong urge to weep whenever I see one of my friends’ babies. My therapist says it’s a normal feeling to be having at my age and I shouldn’t be hard on myself. And, luckily, I’m not hard on myself, because I know deep down that it’s the baby’s fault. Also, it’s an early-two-thousands party, and none of us had babies back then!!!

Remember using LimeWire, ha ha?

Did I mention we’ve got punch that may or may not have been spiked? (Shaggy voice: It wasn’t me!) But, unlike at my last party, I’ll make sure it’s not so strong that people start to ugly-cry and scream, “I should have studied law when I had the chance!”

How good were the Dandy Warhols?!

I think this rager will be so epic that by the end of the night we’ll be just like Blink 182, asking, “What’s my age again?” (I myself remain firmly in my twenties until July 9th, at 6:32 A.M. E.D.T.)

Snacks and drinks provided, but B.Y.O. Von Dutch hat and ability to repress small talk about how you’re thinking of going freelance but not sure whether you have a strong enough client base. And plus-ones allowed, as long as they don’t tell me it’s worth moving to the suburbs because you really get so much more for your money out there.

C u soon!!! (Ha ha, remember when we all used to text like that and didn’t have mindfulness apps on our phones?)

Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized—an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor, and its confirmation all the more coveted for being so. In his fundamental study, “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,” Mark McGurl detailed how, in postwar America, anointing and cultivating literary talent became the purview of creative-writing programs and how, in turn, certain modes of writing came to be privileged above others. With this professionalization—indeed, institutionalization—of a nation’s art form, three injunctions popularized by the M.F.A. became holy writ. Write what you know; show, don’t tell; find your voice. Of this trinity, only the second speaks explicitly to craft and seems readily practicable. It’s the first and last dicta, however, that have proved the most influential, not through their utility but through their confounding simplicity. The question isn’t whether you should cultivate knowledge or voice. The question instead is a screamed “Yes, but how?”

When we identify talent, we say that we’ve found “the real deal,” a flimsy idiom for a solid belief—that, although talent as an entity may be undefinable, it’s still provable. It’s on this putative objectivity, in all its insidious allure, that M.F.A. programs are predicated, offering themselves as arbiters of talent who are able to alchemize literary promise into achievement. Many have found these claims at once irresistible and dubious. One year after graduating from the University of Arizona’s creative-writing program, David Foster Wallace wrote, “The only thing a Master of Fine Arts degree actually qualifies one to do, is teach . . . Fine Arts.” Wallace’s essay, “The Fictional Future” was one of several collected, in 2014, in “MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” a book that reanimated and enshrined questions both existential (Can writing be taught?) and practical (How does a writer pay rent?). The bathos of the latter tends to casts an absurd light on the former.

So it is that two new satirical novels set in creative-writing programs, Lucy Ives’s
“Loudermilk: Or, the Real Poet; or, the Origin of the World” and Mona Awad’s “Bunny,” engage with the chimera of “the real deal.” They are set, respectively, in a version of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a version of Brown University and are authored by graduates of those institutions. These books constitute a kind of institutional critique, to borrow a term from the art world, or an institutional autofiction, to adapt an existing literary term. On the one hand, the satirical tone of these novels tips us off that the institutions being portrayed are fundamentally defective. And yet the pages in our hands are tangible counterfactuals! Because isn’t the published novel—the material proof every candidate longs for—evidence of these institutions’ success? Here is the M.F.A. program becoming self-conscious, displaying both impatience with and anxiety over the criterion of authenticity.

The centerpiece of the program is the workshop, or rather, excuse me, the Workshop; in David O. Dowling’s recently published history of America’s most famous creative-writing program, “A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” the word is reverentially capitalized. For anyone unfamiliar with insular world of the M.F.A., the term might conjure scenes of elvin ingenuity—merry workers laboring at their craft. Instead, this mainstay of the creative-writing program has more often been understood as a process of destruction, of tough love that tears you down to build you up. Dowling writes admiringly about the “volatile cocktail of ego and competition”—the “blood sport” of peers ripping each other’s work to shreds—that pervaded the Iowa workshop in the decades after its founding, in 1936.

His book opens with the boozing, brawling John Berryman—he of the “blow-torch approach” to teaching—receiving a punch from a student. Lucy Ives’s
' funny, cerebral “Loudermilk,” which takes its epigraph (“Rilke was a jerk”) from Berryman himself, lampoons this kind of masculine swagger. Its prime object of satire, however, is the very bedrock of the workshop’s pedagogy, the identification of artistic achievement. The novel’s titular handsome idiot, Troy Augustus Loudermilk, is a fraud in the most incontrovertible sense; it’s only by passing off the poems of his nebbishy friend Harry Rego as his own that he’s gained entry to the prestigious Seminars for Writing. These plagiarized poems go down well, but what Loudermilk is truly rewarded for is not his artistic achievement on the page but his charismatic performance in the workshop, including cracking jokes and insulting his professor’s sexual prowess. When you’re a fraud and don’t care, you have nothing to lose.

It’s not just the students who don’t care: Loudermilk’s professors include the dyspeptic (and, in his belligerence and drunkenness, rather Berryman-esque) Don Hillary, who welcomes his young poets with a showily profane speech, assuring them that he does not give “one donkey fuck what you do while you’re here.” One student, Clare, overhearing this speech as she walks by his classroom, wonders, “Could one imagine that his pronouncements herald a really excellent form of meritocracy, somehow? That his is, paradoxically, the most sublime of metrics—since incomprehensible, profane, and therefore absolute?” In a field where the “metrics” are so hard to define, much less achieve, you can stop caring at all—like Loudermilk and Hillary—or, like Harry, you can care too much.

As Harry, whom we understand to be a “real” talent, becomes more invested in his poems, he writes himself a long list of questions that include “Am I the one who is writing these words?” and “Who is the one who is writing?” Eventually, he concludes that “the only way to get to the poem is to drop into a perfectly Harry-shaped shadow.” In other words, he must vacate himself to find himself, must fake himself into authenticity. We sense that his private litany of questions, though painful, are far more conducive to his literary growth than the public jousting of the workshop.

Ives’s hyperbolic satire—her outsized, loquacious characters, her stylistic brio—lays bare the central fallacy of “write what you know.” In one sense, we believe Ives is drawing from her own, all-too-real experience. And yet, with its ludic meta-fictionality and the self-conscious construction of characters, the novel cleverly dodges knowable reality, circumventing the question of authenticity altogether.

In “Bunny,” a work of toothsome and fanged intelligence, the agons of ego and machismo are replaced by the sly and saccharine maneuvers of a femme-y clique who call themselves “Bunnies.” Our narrator, the studiedly uneffusive Samantha, joins these women in the first all-female fiction cohort at the prestigious Warren College. “Workshop is an integral part of the Process,” pontificates Ursula, a professor whose self-regard is sustained by the idolatry of her students. (Here, the capitalization of the word “workshop” is scathing.) “Workshop never ‘confuses us,’ rather it opens us up, helps us grow, leads us in new and difficult and exciting directions. My Workshop in particular, I think you’ll find.”

My Workshop: the proprietorial claim is key. The tenor of the workshop proceeds from the leader, which is to say, the particularities and prejudices of one person—one ego. At some point taste, like talent, becomes an irreducible entity. The Bunnies engage in frothy pieties and hyperbolic niceties, telling each other things like, “Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?” Within a rhetoric of universal approbation, every writer turns craven; all talent withers.

Though Awad plays knowingly with the tropes of eighties movies (the book’s hot-pink jacket copy mentions the cult classic “Heathers”; like Winona Ryder in that movie, Samantha has an air of quiet mutiny), we recognize these Bunnies as the apotheosis of that most contemporary archetype, the basic bitch. They love froyo from Pinkberry. They binge-watch “The Bachelorette.” Their Instagram captions are littered with the self-evidently false hashtag #amwriting. “Basic” in this sense is a synonym of sorts for “inauthentic”; we recognize the type, or at least we think we do. These Bunnies, so very bloodless seeming, are in fact quite bloodthirsty. Because, in addition to writing fiction, they’re engaged in an extracurricular workshop of their own devising, where, unlike in the simpering diplomacy of the classroom, their creativity is literally visceral. They conjure dream boys, real flesh-and-blood creations that they call “drafts,” “hybrids,” “darlings,” from rabbits. Unfortunately, these characters can get unruly, and the girls keep an axe close at hand. “Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, you know?” coos one Bunny. Just as Ives has constructed a postmodern playhouse to deflate the notion of authenticity, Awad has winkingly deployed the great ruse of the supernatural.

Are these Bunnies for real? The answer to this question is a twofold no. They are false in their friendships, and, worse, they have no true talent. Even in their own workshop, they never quite manage to pull things off. Their “darlings” always fall just a bit short of the intended reality, lacking fully operational hands or penises. In other words, the Bunnies fail both literally, within their necromancy, and metaphorically, within their writing, to bring their characters to life.

Like rabbits, bad writers are everywhere, bred by M.F.A. programs across the country, turning out banal, interchangeable stories. When Samantha finally conjures her own piece of literature, it’s from a lone and noble creature—a stag. Her creation, Max, is the workshop’s first fully functioning boy. In the wickedly hilarious climax of the novel, the Bunnies show up to their last class bruised, bleeding, and ready, finally, to get real. With sweet feminist irony, it’s this dream boy made flesh who finally liberates them from that feminine yoke, extreme faux niceness. One classmate passes a simple and supremely unsayable verdict of another’s work: “I hated it.”

Max, Samantha’s triumph of extracurricular creativity, is also the agent of institutional destruction. In true Frankensteinien fashion, the proof of the author’s brilliance is her character’s apparent autonomy. No one proves this more starkly than Ava—Samantha’s lodestar and world center, her beloved best friend, whose contempt for the Bunnies (“that little-girl cult”) and Warren is spectacular. She is the one character who seems to radiate pure, unassailable selfhood—tango-dancing, white-haired Ava, to whom Max says, rapturously, “being with you is like being in literature.” It turns out that Ava really is too good to be true; she, like Max and the other bloody boys, is a fictional invention come to life. How is it, then, that she feels more real than anyone else, both to the reader and to Samantha, her unwitting “author”? The question is unanswerable, or, rather, the answer is that unanswerable thing, talent realized. For Samantha, it’s the possibility of companionship with her characters (no less real for being, technically, fictional), not the praise or censure of peers or professors, that galvanizes her to write more, and to write better.

In the final chapters of “Loudermilk,” a “poetry showdown” finally reveals Loudermilk as a fraud and his proxy as the real poet. But, as with an unshameable wind sock of a politician whose lies and blunders do nothing to unseat them, this is by no means Loudermilk’s undoing. Workshop, which we understand to be a sort of microcosm for what Ives later denounces as the “banal hypocrisy” of institutional American life at large, has worked well for Loudermilk. He skips town for New York and gets an agent. Of course he does. “I feel like I couldn’t even have planned this, like how amazing things worked out,” he writes in an e-mail to Harry. “But, hey when you’ve got extreme talent haha ;).” He does not, however, have the last word. At the end of the novel, his author seeks to make explicit her intent in a startling afterword:

This confounding, fourth-wall breaking address is a spectacularly brazen announcement of inauthenticity. Ives seems to be reminding us that she has fabricated Loudermilk, just as he has fabricated himself. Our “hollow hero” is a fiction who knows himself to be a fiction. Might authenticity itself be an equally fragile myth?

Master’s degrees, agents, and advances can make a difference: talent thrives on recognition, and bills need to be paid. There is, however, no great and infallible arbiter of literary merit. The longing to be anointed, once and for all, as “the real deal” is a fundamentally hopeless desire. Moreover, such longing for external approbation might be the very thing stymieing a young writer from becoming what they need to be, since, as Harry and Samantha realize, both “knowledge” and “voice” can only be discovered for oneself, not bestowed from beyond. What is required is a sort of faith in uncertainty—an acceptance that one’s capacity to conjure authentic new realities will have to be tested again and again, that the writer must be in a constant state of becoming. (In this sense, Harry’s self-interrogation, born of self-doubt, is essential, if exhausting.) And, since thinking must precede (good) writing, it follows that a question might be a more generative tool for a writer than an injunction. Kant famously posed a heuristic in three questions. The first serves as a useful counterpart to the M.F.A.’s first dictum. Not “Write what you know” but, with its honest combination of curiosity and humility, “What can I know?”

“The Star-Spangled Banner” has long been a focal point of political protest and recrimination. The National Football League shunned the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick after he took a knee during the singing of the national anthem at games. At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos responded to the anthem by raising gloved fists in a Black Power salute. During the Vietnam War, Jimi Hendrix twisted the tune into a dissonant wail. Yet nothing in the tangled history of “The Star-Spangled Banner” quite compares to a 1917 incident involving Karl Muck, the music director of the Boston Symphony. As Melissa D. Burrage relates in her new book, “The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America,” a brouhaha over the anthem led to the public shaming and eventual arrest of one of the world’s leading conductors.

Muck, an elegant figure with a coolly disciplined podium style, had arrived in Boston in 1906, having long led the Berlin Court Opera. He was a mainstay of the Bayreuth Festival, presiding over summertime performances of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” His exalted status in German music matched prevalent tastes in Boston, a city with a considerable German-speaking community. But the atmosphere changed markedly after the United States declared war on Germany, in April, 1917. In October of that year, Muck and the Boston Symphony gave a concert in Providence, Rhode Island. Patriotic demonstrations at concerts had become routine, and Henry Lee Higginson, the patrician founder and chief executive of the Boston Symphony, was asked to include “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the program. For various reasons, Higginson declined to do so. An arrangement of the anthem was not immediately available, and Higginson felt that patriotic tunes had “no place in an art concert.”

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The blame fell squarely on Muck, whose attachment to Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German Empire was well known. John Rathom, the editor of the Providence Journal, concocted a story that Muck had refused to play the anthem. (In fact, the conductor knew nothing of the request until after the concert, although he later echoed Higginson’s snobbish stance.) Rathom had made his name printing sensational and often fictitious tales of German espionage in the United States. Once the war began, such paranoid chatter was encouraged by George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, which whipped up a nationwide wave of anti-German hysteria. Rathom followed up his bogus Muck story with absurd accusations that the conductor was engaged in subversive activity.

Burrage describes an incendiary public meeting that took place in Baltimore, Maryland, in advance of a Muck concert that was scheduled for early November. Edwin Warfield, the former governor of Maryland, gave a speech saying that the conductor belonged in an internment camp; that he should not be allowed to insult the city where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written; that “mob violence would prevent it, if necessary”; and that he would lead the mob himself. A crowd of two thousand applauded wildly and shouted comments to the effect that “Muck should have been shot” and “A wooden box would be a better place.” There was a chant of “Kill Muck! Kill Muck!” Such threats were not idle. In April, 1918, the citizens of Collinsville, Illinois, forced a German-American coal miner to sing the anthem walking naked across broken glass. They then lynched him. Not surprisingly, Muck’s Baltimore concert was cancelled.

Most of this has been reported in previous accounts of the Muck affair, but Burrage adds a new wrinkle in detailing the bizarre role played by Lucie Jay, a member of the executive board of the New York Philharmonic. The Boston Symphony was widely considered to be America’s preëminent orchestra, and the Philharmonic hoped to equal or surpass its Northern rival. Burrage shows that Jay made it her mission to bring down Muck, and that as early as 1915 she was agitating against Muck’s proposed pro-German activity. She actually travelled to Boston in that year to demand that the orchestra stop playing German music, even though no such measure was deemed necessary for the Philharmonic. Whether she had anything to do with Rathom’s “Star-Spangled Banner” crusade is unclear, but she certainly capitalized on the outrage.

Matters came to a head in March, 1918, when the Boston Symphony gave several concerts at Carnegie Hall. Jay had tried mightily to prevent the concerts from happening. All manner of wild allegations circulated: that Muck had plotted to blow up munitions depots; that he had sabotaged American guns; that he had dispatched prostitutes to military bases to infect soldiers with venereal diseases; that he had radioed messages to U-boats from his vacation home in Seal Harbor, Maine. The conductor had been considered immune from an enemy-aliens arrest because he held Swiss citizenship. Jay and her allies proceeded to cast doubt on that claim, to the point that Higginson felt compelled to carry Muck’s citizenship papers onto the Carnegie stage and wave them at the audience.

A few days after the Carnegie appearances, Muck was arrested, in the middle of a rehearsal of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, in Boston. The Massachusetts attorney general and the Bureau of Investigation had discovered that Muck was having an affair with a young mezzo-soprano named Rosamond Young. That relationship allowed investigators to paint Muck as both subversive and immoral—a one-two punch of xenophobia and puritanism. Muck’s home was raided and his assets were seized. Police pored over his score of the St. Matthew Passion, believing that its markings contained a secret code. Anti-American remarks in the letters with Young were deemed sufficient evidence of sedition. Muck spent the remainder of the war in an internment camps, where he conducted the camp orchestras. In a later interview with H. L. Mencken, Muck claimed that on one hot day he and his musicians performed Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in the nude.

Burrage’s book is commendably even-handed in its treatment of Muck, declining to make an innocent victim out of him. The conductor was fiercely anti-Semitic, and when he returned to Germany, in the early nineteen-twenties, he swung to the ultra-nationalist right, becoming an admirer of Hitler. Higginson, for his part, was prejudiced against Jews and supported measures to restrict immigration. Jay, on the other hand, campaigned against punitive immigration laws, not least because they were contrary to shipping and railroad interests in which she was invested. Muck’s relationships with young women were exploitative, although Burrage points out that he was one of very few male musicians of the period who supported female aspirations toward conducting and composing. One of his protégées, Antonia Brico, conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930—the first woman to do so.

The Muck scandal had significant consequences for musical culture in the United States. In 1914, classical music held an exalted position in American life, appealing not only to élite audiences but also to a broad public. The Muck affair helped to brand the European tradition as suspect and unpatriotic. The historian E. Douglas Bomberger, in his book “Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture,” argues that homegrown musical traditions, both classical and popular, benefitted from the wartime demonization of German music and musicians. The year 1917 saw the rapid rise of jazz, which had impeccable credentials as a hundred-percent-American enterprise. Bomberger writes, “The challenge to traditional musical authority may be seen as a symbol of the American military challenge to traditional European authority.” Jazz’s nationalist allure helps to explain why it became so popular in a white population that was otherwise pervaded by racism.

Bomberger’s book leaves one with the uneasy feeling that the First World War encouraged the rise of an American musical chauvinism, one that restricted the polyglot makeup of the nation’s culture at the turn of the last century. Governor Warfield, at the rabid anti-Muck rally in Baltimore, put this nativist attitude most succinctly: “The day is coming when ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ will be sung by every free nation on the globe, and the people will jump to their feet when they hear it, just as you have jumped to your feet today.”

When you ask experts how bots influence politics—that is, what specifically these bits of computer code that purport to be human can accomplish during an election—they will give you a list: bots can smear the opposition through personal attacks; they can exaggerate voters’ fears and anger by repeating short simple slogans; they can overstate popularity; they can derail conversations and draw attention to symbolic and ultimately meaningless ideas; they can spread false narratives. In other words, they are an especially useful tool, considering how politics is played today.

On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter. Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. Just as pharmaceutical companies must disclose that the happy people who say a new drug has miraculously improved their lives are paid actors, bots in California—or rather, the people who deploy them—will have to level with their audience.

“It’s literally taking these high-end technological concepts and bringing them home to basic common-law principles,” Robert Hertzberg, a California state senator who is the author of the bot-disclosure law, told me. “You can’t defraud people. You can’t lie. You can’t cheat them economically. You can’t cheat ’em in elections. ”

California’s bot-disclosure law is more than a run-of-the-mill anti-fraud rule. By attempting to regulate a technology that thrives on social networks, the state will be testing society’s resolve to get our (virtual) house in order after more than two decades of a runaway Internet. We are in new terrain, where the microtargeting of audiences on social networks, the perception of false news stories as genuine, and the bot-led amplification of some voices and drowning-out of others have combined to create angry, ill-informed online communities that are suspicious of one another and of the government.

Regulating bots should be low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving the Internet. The California law doesn’t even ban them outright but, rather, insists that they identify themselves in a manner that is “clear, conspicuous, and reasonably designed.”

But the path from bill to law was hardly easy. Initial versions of the legislation were far more sweeping: large platforms would have been required to take down bots that didn’t reveal themselves, and all bots were covered, not just explicitly political or commercial ones. The trade group the Internet Association and the digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, mobilized quickly in opposition, and those provisions were dropped from the draft bill.

Opposition to the bot bill came both from the large social-network platforms that profit from an unregulated public square and from adherents to the familiar libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley, which sees the Internet as a reservoir of unfettered individual freedom. Together, they try to block government encroachment. As John Perry Barlow, an early cyberlibertarian and a founder of E.F.F., said to the “Governments of the Industrial World” in his 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”: “You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

The point where economic self-interest stops and libertarian ideology begins can be hard to identify. Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, appealed to personal freedom to defend his platform’s decision to allow the microtargeting of false, incendiary information. “I do not think we want to go so far towards saying that a private company prevents you from saying something that it thinks is factually incorrect,” he said. “That to me just feels like it’s too far and goes away from the tradition of free expression.”

In Aspen, Zuckerberg was responding to a question about why his platform declined to take down an altered video that was meant to fool viewers into thinking that Nancy Pelosi was slurring her speech. In an interview last year with Recode, he tried to explain why Facebook allows Holocaust deniers to spread false conspiracy theories.

To be clear, Facebook isn’t the government (yet). As a private company, it can and does take down speech it doesn’t like—nude pictures, for example. What Zuckerberg was describing was the kind of political speech he believes the government should protect and the policy he wants Facebook to follow.

The first bots, short for chatbots, couldn’t hide their artificiality. When they were invented, back in the nineteen-sixties, they weren’t capable of manipulating their users. Most bot creators worked in university labs and didn’t conjure these programs to exploit the public. Today’s bots have been designed to achieve specific goals by appearing human and blending into the cacophony of online voices. Many have been commercialized or politicized.

In the 2016 Presidential campaign, bots were created to support both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but pro-Trump bots outnumbered pro-Clinton ones five to one, by one estimate, and many were dispatched by Russian intermediaries. Twitter told a Senate committee that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, fifty thousand bots that it concluded had Russian ties retweeted Trump’s tweets nearly half a million times, which represented 4.25 per cent of all his retweets, roughly ten times the level of Russian bot retweets supporting Clinton.

Bots also gave Trump victories in quick online polls asking who had won a Presidential debate; they disrupted discussions of Trump’s misdeeds or crude statements; and they relentlessly pushed dubious policy proposals through hashtags like #draintheswamp.

They have also aided Trump during his Presidency. Suspected bots created by unidentified users drove an estimated forty to sixty per cent of the Twitter discussion of a “caravan” of Central American migrants headed to the U.S., which was pushed by the President and his supporters prior to the 2018 midterm elections. Trump himself has retweeted accounts that praise him and his Presidency, and which appear to be bots. And last week a suspected bot network was discovered to be smearing Senator Kamala Harris, of California, with a form of “birtherism” after her strong showing in the first round of Democratic-primary debates.

The problem with attempts to regulate bots, the E.F.F. and other critics argue, is that many of us see them only as a destructive tool. They contend that bots are a new medium of self-expression that is in danger of being silenced. In a letter to the California Assembly, the organization argued that the bot-labelling bill was overly broad and “would silence or diminish the very voices it hopes to protect.” The codes behind the bots are produced by people, they note, and the government should have to meet the toughest standards if it attempts to regulate their speech in any way.

Bots certainly can be beneficial. There are bots created by artists that find interesting patterns in society; bots that inform us about history; bots that ask searching questions about the relationship between people and machines by pretending to be human. “Just because a statement is ultimately ‘made’ by a robot does not mean that it is not the product of human creation,” Madeline Lamo, then a fellow at the University of Washington Tech Policy Lab, and Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor, wrote in “Regulating Bot Speech,” a recent article for the UCLA Law Review, which questions the California law.

Jamie Lee Williams, a lawyer at E.F.F. who analyzed the bot law, called the original measure a perilous reduction in free-speech rights. “What scares me a lot,” she said, “is this idea that First Amendment protections are too great and we should whittle it back and relax our standards and allow more government restrictions on speech—giving the government the power to police speech is a dangerous thing.”

In the end, E.F.F. was pleased enough by the changes to the bill to move from opposition to neutrality. Neutrality was as far as the organization would go, Williams commented. “I don’t think E.F.F. would ever come out in support of rules like this,” she said. “There are a lot of good bots.”

Hertzberg, the state senator who authored the legislation, told me that he was glad that the changes to the bill before passage were related to the implementation of the law, rather than to its central purpose of requiring that bots reveal themselves to the public when used politically or commercially. A lawyer by training, Hertzberg said that he resented the accusation that he didn’t care about First Amendment concerns. “There is no effort in this bill to have a chilling effect on speech—zero,” he said. “The argument you go back to is, Do bots have free speech? People have free speech. Bots are not people.”

Modern compression socks were invented by Conrad Jobst, a dashing German engineer who lived in Toledo, Ohio, and suffered from varicose veins. He also developed precision gun sights for the U.S. during the First World War and patented the car sunroof, but compression socks, which he invented around 1950, were his flagship achievement. On paper, there’s not much to them: they’re very tight socks. Tightest near the ankle, but still pretty tight up top. They work by countering hydrostatic pressure in the wearer’s legs—that is, the bulging of the veins and tissues caused by fluid that’s been pulled down to the extremities and can’t get up.

It’s a phenomenon that I first encountered on a trip to India with my mother, to visit relatives, several years ago. I’d been making this journey all my life, with no physical consequences. Now, getting off the plane, I noticed that my feet had become distinctly puffy. The slope of my instep was as smooth and soft as a freshly fluffed pillow. The bone structure of my ankle had been swallowed in flesh. The swelling was still there the next morning, and the morning after that. My mother was having the same problem. I looked at my grandmother, sitting in a wheelchair, her feet permanently inflated like two dainty balloons: a vision of my genetic destiny.

Still, I thought little of the problem until a couple of years later, when I was planning what to wear to a friend’s wedding in South Africa. I hoped to wear a pair of shiny red heels, but then I pictured my feet as I knew they would be after the flight—as round and peg-like as a baby elephant’s. I turned to Google, which insisted that the way to prevent one’s feet from swelling on long-haul flights is to wear compression socks on the plane. I’d heard of compression socks as a remedy for deep-vein thrombosis, a condition that seemed as abstract and distant to me as amnesia or face blindness. But it appeared that, if I wanted to wear the heels, I would first have to wear this serious-sounding medical device, usually indicated for the bedridden, the elderly, the pregnant.

Compression socks are often marketed as “travel socks” and disguised to look like normal socks. You can find any number of designs online: argyle compression socks, or polka-dot compression socks, or patriotic compression socks. You could go silky and sleek or vaguely sporty. But I wasn’t going to have some novelty-hosiery company compressing me. Instead, I took careful measurements of the circumference of my feet, my ankles, my calves, according to instructions I found online (buy the socks too big and there’s no point, too small and they cut off circulation) and then headed to a medical-supply store on the Upper East Side as though I were shopping for a bespoke suit.

Amid the walkers and shower stools and adult diapers, the compression socks had half an aisle to themselves. There were dozens of pairs to choose from, of different heights and pressure ratings, but they were almost all solid black or nude. Some came in clear plastic bags without branding; others, from Jobst, the company started by Conrad, were packaged in flat little boxes with pictures of beautiful young models on coffee dates and at business meetings. I selected a classic style—just like the ones they use in hospitals—with a low pressure rating.

They are knee-high and flesh-colored, like pantyhose but thicker and without the sheen, so that they give my legs a corpselike pallor. The top couple of inches have a ribbed pattern, which leaves a deep imprint in the fat deposit between my knee and my calf muscle. The other end has no toes, almost like the tip has been cut off, but with another little ring of material, so you know it’s on purpose.

The toelessness is the ugliest feature of the socks (which have no attractive features) and the most likely to give them away as an assistive garment. But the pleasantness of having your toes free and accessible, to wiggle or splay or examine or scratch, is a revelation, particularly considering how difficult it is to get the socks on or off. They actually come with instructions, and there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube, mostly featuring attractive young women with long, lithe legs who exhibit no sign of venous insufficiency. There are also a number of devices that can help: the Jobst Stocking Donner, the Sigvaris Doff n’ Donner, the Juzo Slippie Gator. But there’s really no dignified way to go about it. There will be contortions and tuggings and bulges of flesh.

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The method I’ve landed on is to scrunch the fabric up into a ring, put your toes in first, then unfurl the sock slowly, until your heel slips into place, and then on up the length of your shin. It’s a lot like putting on pantyhose, if your pantyhose were staging an active rebellion. You don’t want to pull too hard, because they will come up too high and the elastic is uncomfortable if it hits the crease of your knee. If you don’t pull hard enough, there will be bunching and creasing, making the sock too tight in the wrinkled areas. The aim, as you put them on, is to surrender to the tension of the fabric, to encase your leg in it like a caterpillar building its chrysalis. The only way to take them off is to peel them from the top, turning them inside out, like a wetsuit, gradually revealing the good work they have performed.

When I landed in Cape Town and unwrapped my calves, I found them untouched by the ravages of cabin pressure. I wore the heels to the wedding; my ankles looked great. But the socks also seemed to have an all-over salutary effect that I hadn’t anticipated. Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1780, argued that walking was the ideal form of exercise partly because it “occasions a great pressure on the vessels of the foot,” causing the soles of the feet to behave like piston pumps, activating movement throughout your physiology, with the result that “the fluids are shaken, the humors attenuated, the secretions facilitated, and all goes well.” I doubt modern science would fully support Franklin’s theory, but it resonates with my compression-sock experience: there’s something about starting at the bottom of your feet and squeezing all your excess up, as though you were a tube of toothpaste. Your body feels lighter, your head feels clearer, your limbs feel freer, and all goes well.

Or perhaps I’m succumbing to the spiritual effect that the socks have had on me as they’ve become a ritual part of my travel routine. The first time I wore them, I found them deeply embarrassing. I hid in the bathroom to put them on and made sure that they were always covered with real socks. These days, I put them on in the boarding area, for God and everyone to see. I feel a kind of pride in my proactiveness, my adaptiveness, my ability to admit my needs and then meet them. Wearing compression socks has become an act of self-assertion, an acknowledgement that my body is subject to the forces of the universe and a reassurance that, when necessary, I can exert forces of my own.

“Spider-Man: Far from Home,” starring Tom Holland as the Queens teen-ager Peter Parker, rapidly intertwines the big events that capped the “Avengers” cycle—Thanos’s mass obliteration of half of humanity and of half the Avengers, in “Infinity War,” and the return of those victims coupled with the (likely definitive) deaths of other heroes, in “Endgame”—with the conventional high-school life that Peter leads when he’s not Spider-Man. The incorporation of the prior movies’ plot twists into each new work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a formidable screenwriting challenge, and the makers of “Far from Home” meet that challenge with a graceful wit that, unfortunately, isn’t matched by much else in the movie.

Early on in “Far from Home,” there’s a clip from a memorial video tribute to Tony Stark, Black Widow, and others among “Endgame” ’s departed, which is being shown as part of a benefit event for victims of “the Blip”—the catastrophic event, shown in “Infinity War,” that wiped out half the world’s population. Now, five years later, the victims of the Blip have all come back, with results that are somewhat comedic: when those who “blipped out” returned, they nonetheless remained exactly the same age as at the time they left. That’s why one of Peter’s friends, Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori), a Blipee, complains that his little brother (who didn’t blip) is now his older brother. (Imagine if Steven Soderbergh had the chance to direct a Marvel movie, and the world-building feast of civic fantasy that he might have made of the comedies, melodramas, and perhaps even tragedies resulting from the sudden return of Blip victims.)

Unfortunately, the director of “Far from Home,” Jon Watts, and the film’s screenwriters, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, stick only briefly with the dislocation caused by the Blip before quickly leveraging it into far more conventional heroics and a far simpler dramatic dilemma. The victims’ benefit is a public event featuring May Parker (Marisa Tomei), Peter’s aunt and guardian, as m.c.; it also features Spider-Man, the local hero of Queens, who’s there to sign autographs—and who, of course, remains silent, to avoid being identified with the sixteen-year-old Peter. That secrecy is carried over from the previous Spider-Man movie, “Homecoming,” which hinted at a future romance between Peter and his classmate M.J. (played in both movies by Zendaya), and suggested the complications inherent in keeping his superheroic identity hidden from her. (Only his best friend, Ned, played by Jacob Batalon, is aware of Peter’s double life.) Peter’s romantic dreams—and their conflict with his Avenging responsibilities—are the dramatic mainspring of “Far from Home.”

From the start of the film, strange things are happening—the small Mexican town of Ixtenco has been reduced to ruins by what residents call a cyclone with a face. Other towns elsewhere have been similarly ravaged by crude colossi, and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has shown up and taken note. He dispatches the late Tony Stark’s friend and factotum, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), to go backstage at the benefit and let Peter know that his Spider services will be required. But Peter has other plans: the school year is nearing its end, and he and a handful of classmates—including M.J. and Ned—are heading to Europe, under teachers’ supervision, for a so-called science trip, where Peter plans to ingratiate himself with M.J. and bump their relationship out of the friend zone.

The first stop is Venice, where the cyclone-like monster makes another appearance—a huge humanoid made of churning water that threatens the city’s architectural treasures, its population, and Peter’s friends. Peter’s Spider-Man suit is up in his hotel room and he can’t get to it in time—but another superhero, Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), a greenish man with a green globe head and a trail of green smoke, makes an appearance and fends off the monster, earning himself, from his appearance on local news, the quasi-Italian moniker of Mysterio.

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Then Nick Fury arrives and cajoles Peter into sacrificing the trip in order to save the world—and guilts Peter, too, with the delivery of a gift and a legacy: Tony Stark’s distinctive sunglasses, which the dying hero had expressly willed to Peter. But those glasses turn out to be something more: the command center of Tony’s interactive system of surveillance and weaponry, called Edith—an acronym for “Even dead, I’m the hero.” Nick gets Peter into a meeting with Mysterio, who explains the danger they face: the monster is one of the four so-called Elementals—of earth, air, fire, and water. The fire monster is about to lay waste to Prague, where Peter and Beck must go in order to stop it and thwart its plans to destroy the world.

But—avoiding spoilers—another villain appears, and his weapon of choice is distinctively cinematic: he commands a device called Illusion-Tech, by means of which he produces three-dimensional images and sounds of an extraordinary realism that occupy vast city spaces and persuade both the general public and the Avengers of their menace. In effect, this dastardly illusionist is a maker of persuasive computer-graphic action scenes akin to those that Marvel movies are based on, and these effects serve two purposes for their master villain. First, they delude Peter, Nick, and any other superheroes in the vicinity into combatting chimeras and rendering themselves vulnerable to the villain’s actual, physical weaponry. Second, they do exactly what the movies themselves do: they create illusions that are taken for realities, which are reported on by the media as authentic news, and which, in the process, allow the villain to craft a public image to his own advantage.

The villain in “Far from Home” is a malevolent director who takes advantage of what he considers the general gullibility of the public. He’s a manipulative cynic who declares, “It’s easy to fool people when they’re already fooling themselves”; he asserts that “people believe, and nowadays they’ll believe anything”; he boasts, “They’ll see what I want them to see,” and he explains that he created his illusions “to give the world something to believe in,” adding—with his own arrogant self-delusion—that his trickery “is the truth.” What Peter has to do, in order to save himself, his friends, and the world, is—as he puts it—“to get on the inside of the illusion,” to penetrate it to find and defeat the villain who’s creating it.

“Far from Home” is a work of crude and trendy distinctions between material realities and fabricated media images. Made as if in response to the prevalence of fake news and insidious propaganda, the movie relies on a sort of informational virtue signalling that vaunts its own cynical self-promotion: the idea that Marvel’s own audiovisual illusions, unlike those made by the villain, come clearly labelled as fantasies and aren’t meant to override the ability of viewers to distinguish them from reality. This false modesty conceals the colossal success of the Marvel series in the pretense that an image, however fabricated or illusory, doesn’t itself constitute a reality for some subset of its viewers. (The details of this very movie, after all, are more widely reported and discussed than those of any recent documentary.) Lest the Marvel moguls doubt the reality of their own illusions, they should imagine the outcry that would result from their repudiation of the details of previous Marvel movies or of the canonical characters.

Rather, “Far from Home” follows the dictates of the series with a solemn and pharisaical rigidity, pursuing the didactic simplicity of its bland heroics with little other than a few snappy comebacks to distract from the lockstep drama. In the process, the movie doesn’t bother to establish its own ground rules of reality or truth. There are not any clear premises for the fighting, nor any sense of what may prove lethal or disabling. Peter takes part in plenty of rock-’em-sock-’em action scenes, in the course of which he takes crashing falls that would mean broken bones and ruptured organs for mere mortals. Though, beneath his suit, he, too, is a vulnerable human, whose vulnerability always takes second place to a bit of jokey imagery, as when he is hit by a speeding train and, though knocked out, awakens mildly bruised in a small-town jail cell in the Netherlands, taken there, as if to a drunk tank, instead of to a hospital bed. There’s no sense of physical danger to the movie’s characters—and yet, appallingly, the mighty scenes of grand-scale urban destruction, in such places as Venice, Prague, and London, imply a gory trail of bodies that the movie doesn’t dare to deliver or even hint at. Its stakes remain theoretical; its superheroic violence remains fun.

The ostensible virtuousness of the computer-generated fantasies of “Spider-Man: Far from Home” is foregrounded in the mild earnestness with which it views high-school life and teen-age characters. As malevolent illusions go, the movie’s sanitized emptying-out of childhood and adolescence is of a piece with a general infantilization of imagination through the rigid and narrow superspectacles that superhero movies have become. There’s one sharp moment of comedic flair, when the jealous Peter tells Edith to launch a drone strike against a muscled and debonair classmate named Brad (Remy Hii), who’s also courting M.J., but it’s the only time when any semblance of loose emotion breaks through, and it’s quickly suppressed.

The cast of actors offers a welcome ethnic diversity that, however, is no better developed than that of erstwhile Benetton ads; the movie’s characters have little life beyond what advances the action, little personality beyond the traits that lead to the few and simple strands of the sentimental happy ending. Beside the superheroic overlay, the movie’s depth of characterization and imaginative amplitude of social relations (as well as its placing of American characters in European settings) could have been borrowed straight from the Disney playbook of decades past—in particular, from “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” which got more fun out of its European settings and reflected the authentic modesty of its goofy and self-deprecatingly adolescent humor.

As for the all-important July 4th-tentpole-movie action scenes—the ostensible C.G.I. highlights—they could have used the help of a diabolical illusionist, because the benevolent ones, who made the film, created fight scenes of a fungible churning, without much visual wit, texture, or compositional thought. As for the evil illusions themselves, they’re in accordance with the entire movie’s cinema-by-numbers approach. I’m reminded of Norman Mailer’s remark that the only characters that novelists cannot create are novelists better than themselves.