This is one of the most original and compelling pieces we’ve read at Marrow in a long time. It has everything—YouTube fame, excessive wealth, peak journalism, grief, and beautifully absurd things happening to the deceased. What inspired this story? What first sparked the idea for you?

The spark of the idea was, perhaps not surprisingly, the same loss-of-parent grief that haunts the stories’ two main characters. My dad died in September 2023, and it was sudden, though not unimaginable—he had an autoimmune condition and there’d been several hospitalizations and scares the years before. Nonetheless, the sheer shock of it in addition to the sense of profound loss somehow made a “reveal” or an unveiling a critical aspect of the experience, and thus its expression. There is something, too—grim as this is—about seeing my dad’s body afterward—and those attendant confusing feelings of love, wishing, and animal disgust—that lent itself to a basement (and “abasement”), something shut away, even shame. But at the start, I didn’t quite know it was going that way: more at the surface, I had become obsessed with Mr. Beast, the not-so-thinly-veiled model for Doc Animal. There was a profile of him in the New York Times, I believe, that revealed a character and personality-type only possible in his generation, different than my own. Mr. Beast—and Doc Animal—can view “the algorithm” as an acceptable, maybe even preferable, generator of culture-making. There was a kind of totally unconsidered dedication to beating the algorithm, but unconsidered, I think, because Mr. Beast has never known another world. I thought a millennial reporter employed by a Vice-style mag—their paper gutted by private equity , their line of work becoming obsolete—would be a perfect foil for the Doc.

The piece strikes a sharp balance between ironic humor and genuine emotional weight. How did you approach that tonal balance?

To some extent, that’s just my natural manner of seeing the world: we are a contradictory, funny, blustering sort often blind to ourselves, and irony is a way of holding distance which allows me to think I’m seeing all this noise clearly (I’m not). On a deeper personal level, irony is an aspect of the way of I handle genuine emotional weight, and in this story, I let that sort of just be, it felt true to my experience of grief, a conflict between rationalization and the struggle for perspective and flat-out suffering. The journalist’s stance—and the tone of the writing, which is more of a profile than a literary work—helped motivate the distancing that, in the end, must be collapsed to make way for the genuine feeling.

The story delves into internet culture, capitalism, and spectacle. Would you consider it a critique of any of these, or more of a meditation on their intersection? What themes were you most interested in exploring?

I view it as both, really. I work in media, and every day I see the convergence of all three—internet culture, capitalism, and spectacle—dramatically shape the future of our culture, which really is the future of our thoughts. I’m most interested in our lack of meditation on technology, our seeming blind faith that technology betters what came before, implying everything prior is bad. Video algorithms are a major locus for this, I think, in that they take away our capacity, and over time our desire, to choose. Doc’s creative purpose is totally determined by what the algorithm tells him to do, and it has brought him to a creative place where, whether he likes it or not, he must perfect a kind of instant-reward spectacle. The algorithm has, not surprisingly, made culture in the image of itself. And we seem to be okay with that. For Doc, it takes the shock of grief to make him question his motivations; it takes something human to derail the technological advance. I think that dramatizes my critique of our current moment: we seem to have subordinated our humanity to a technological will that is a money-printing machine for those who operate it. I have no idea why we have done this or permit it to continue.

Do you see Doc Animal as a villain, a product of his environment, or something else entirely? How do you want readers to feel about him?

I think he’s a product of his environment absolutely. He’s a young adult who’s grown up in a soup of social media, influencers, and the internet, and he has no way—how could he?—of viewing cultural production outside that system. His aspirations are shared by many, many people of his generation, and I wanted the readers to appreciate that he is, probably, a natural born leader who has been brave enough to put himself out there. He really has put it all on the line. He’s a major celebrity with real power. And here he is, hosting all his friends at his home on a semi-permanent basis, probably keeping his whole family afloat with his money, responsible for the hopes of many young people who are his idolizing fans. The pressure on someone in his situation is very human. I want readers to feel sympathy for him, and to feel in the end, pity that all these pressures and all these influences have warped his ability to feel his grief. In his world of infinite abundance, he has run out of what he wanted most, which was always finite: time with his father. His response is to throw money at a futile, quixotic project he can only judge in the manner given to him: whether it is cool, whether it is fun. He cannot tell what he himself feels, and that, to me, is a deep tragedy of his character and of our time.

What’s your favorite part about this piece?

SkinnySkeet is my number one favorite invention here, just the name alone, it brings me back to my Xbox Live gamer days and the hilarious tags people would come up with. So much stupid joy in that. Also his sort of maniacally focused obsession with being the backflip guy. People are amazing like that, and one of my favorite parts of the internet is getting to see people master something to a degree you never could have imagined.

I love the dynamic between Jackie and Jon. Brief as their scenes together are, they do a lot of work in telling us who Jackie is, what she’s after, and most importantly, how she has dealt with her grief. I admire Jackie’s gumption and bravery even as she ignores her deeper feelings, and I admire Jon’s earnest care for the world, even as he threatens his own family by having this affair. They’re contradictions, just like Doc, and that makes them alive.

I love the gold room. The Midas touch, so to speak. But it also represents the first glimpse that Doc might, too, have new questions about the true value of his domain.

And of course, coming up with the weirdest, eeriest, ickiest possible thing in that basement. That’s what writing is all about.