Millennial Moods

Anna Aguiar Kosicki considers Cora Lewis’s debut novel “Information Age.”

By Anna Aguiar KosickiJuly 27, 2025

• Fiction

IN A RECENT PIECE for Dirt, Greta Rainbow positioned small presses as the future of literature. Yet this new literary world struggles to be born: the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, an organization that has had a massive impact on small presses and literary magazines, have left the future of American publishing uncertain, with some institutions scaling back and many unsure about their long term viability. Joyland Editions, emerging from a national magazine staffed by approximately 15 people, promises to deliver “books that do not fit into the traditional publishing landscape.” This project comes at a time when the traditional publishing landscape is experiencing its own destabilizing blows: the introduction of artificial intelligence into every facet of life has left writers and editors wondering about the value of their skill sets in the face of a populace that has either abandoned literacy or had it stolen from them. The first book from this new imprint, Information Age by Cora Lewis, follows a millennial Brooklynite protagonist grinding away as a journalist in the last days of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution.

Journalism as an industry has been particularly vulnerable to the financial shifts that have accompanied the digital turn. More than one in 10 American journalists or editors have been laid off in the past three years. Those who cling to jobs face ever-faster news cycles, overnight demands to “upskill” to new formats, and stagnant or decreasing wages. Journalists of principle, who oppose conservative capture or bias in their newsrooms, are pushed out or struggle to find a workplace where they are not asked to manufacture consent for a war-making machine or a billionaire’s climate violence. We are living now in one of the deadliest times for journalists. As of April 2025, Israel had killed 232 journalists in Gaza, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ Costs of War project. Many of these journalists have been local reporters, trying to capture the destruction of their communities and fight for the attention of Western audiences, in the hope that public opinion or direct action will stop an ongoing genocide. It is an existential threat on all fronts.

Yet it is not lived by all as a constant combustion. “[S]low-moving stories rarely splash or break,” Lewis writes. “Time theft, wage theft, the planet’s temperature—background noise.” But as we know, these are the great stories of our time. How can we bring this background noise forward, so we can actually examine the situation and make decisions? Information Age tackles the problems of work, mediation, self-determination, and reproduction amid the dizzying cultural landscape that makes up millennial life.

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Information Age is a manifestation of Lewis’s own diversification of her practice. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and worked at BuzzFeed News for several years before taking a post at the Associated Press. She brings a journalist’s sensibility to her fictional work—always observing, overhearing, curating bits of information for delivery to an audience, in order to sum up the times. In doing so, she troubles ideas of neutrality, inquires into the consequences of a vocation in media, and asks where the current jobs landscape leaves room for the human.

It’s a common refrain that, in the age of social media, everybody is a curator or a journalist—that is, a designated watcher and synthesizer. But of course, there remains a vocational class whose job it is to translate the spinning dizziness of our earth into “the news.” The protagonist of this debut novel is living and working in the last years of an unnamed venture capital–funded news website, beholden to forces that ask her to seamlessly produce. She writes:

A week’s work:

• “This Traveling Football Team Lifted A Car To Rescue A Pinned Woman.”

“We had to stop and become heroes,” said the Bakersfield Black Knights coach.

• “YouTube Icon Says Parents Should Control What Their Kids Watch.”

Following backlash over a clip showing a dead body, the star said he is “re-thinking” what to post to the platform.

• “A Police Officer Has Resigned After Footage Of Him Assaulting A Man Went Viral.”

The police commissioner accepted the officer’s resignation, calling the video “disturbing.”

• “These Photos Show How Students Hid From An Active School Shooter.”

Three students were injured in the incident, which took place during a walkout against gun violence.

But outside of the office, the narrator is unable to turn it off: many chapters are summations of things she’s “heard” or quotations. After reporting her week’s work, she switches back to observing her friends, transforming their interests and vocations into snapshots to add to a collage.

There is this curational sensibility in the composition of the book as well. The novel is made up of five sections consisting of vignettes, some of which were published as short stories prior to being gathered in Information Age. The book retains a sense of poetry and lyricism. A plot does cohere around our protagonist, a story of working for an overgrown child of a media giant, being laid off, struggling with the possibility of having children (or not having children), and trying to find love, but each chapter has its own internal structure and humor as well. Digging for a story involves a certain type of dissociation, the protagonist posing as neutral. The novel’s form forces contemplation to exist alongside a million other kinds of thought, endlessly prompted but rarely given the space it deserves. The rhythmic deluge can become almost hypnotic to the point that plot and humor get swallowed up by a sense of movement, like scrolling on a feed for a little too long, between “this dog barking sounds like the national anthem” and stories about the deaths of children at the hands of a dying empire.

But the novel is not an abstract work: each vignette chronicles someone’s mundanity. Fredric Jameson claimed that “the viability of the […] ‘realist’ novel rested on protagonicity, that is, the capacity of its central character to suffer history’s lightning strikes and to survive in some memorable form, which might well simply be death (or its American equivalent, failure).” But what of this American equivalent in an age when there are increasingly few memorable ways to fail? Whole generations know they will likely never live the way the people before them lived; their failure is taken for granted. Suffering history’s lighting strikes is inevitable, but survival and success are broad categories whose parameters are becoming more uncertain. Unlike Jameson’s realist novel, Information Age operates somewhere between a plot and a mood. There are stops and starts, and fits of realignment, but in a novel committed to the representation of millennial life, the book seems to argue, plotting would prove futile. It would be disingenuous to outline a situation where being laid off from BuzzFeed was merely a stumbling block in the neat narrative of a life that ultimately ascends toward bourgeois normalcy. “Failure” as a step in the hero’s journey is Silicon Valley’s favorite trope, but Information Age knows better.

In reproducing the scene of work, Information Age refuses to cede value to capitalist aesthetics, instead reflecting work as it is and how its pace and structure impact workers. Furthermore, the scene beyond the workplace is never free of the work itself. We meet our protagonist largely as an observer of those around her. The text does not offer autofictional immediacy or intimacy despite its tight first-person focus; in fact, Lewis’s unnamed protagonist remains guarded throughout, a cool journalist looking for a hot tip, pushing toward truth by metabolizing other people’s lives.

The first section is deeply engaged in the temporality of her journalistic work. Of its 21 chapters, 13 begin by dropping the reader into time, including through use of the word “now,” creating a casual immediacy and flow. Four more begin with overheard quotations. Near the end of the section, the chapters start with reflections on the protagonist’s relationship, centering her boyfriend as the journalistic object. From this relationship emerges one of the novel’s few flash points—an abortion, which again is mostly understood in terms of how it relates to the world around the narrator. As blood runs down her leg in the subway, a kind stranger steps in to help. Her blood is not only a representation of her choice to have an abortion but also a physical manifestation of a body that resists the demand to always be “on,” merely a filament for the world’s electricity or a never-ceasing pair of typing hands or watching eyes. Rarely does she allow herself to be truly watched, but this is a moment of stress and tenderness where her guard slips. From this point, she turns her inquisitive vocation inward.

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Millennial women’s reproductive lives have become a central topic of political discussion in recent years as fascist natalists repackage eugenicist ideas for our contemporary moment. This far-right discourse encourages able-bodied white women (and anyone who can fake something approximating this) to have babies for the health of the nation while authorities police and legislate all other types of parents.

The woman at the center of Information Age is theoretically closer to the top of this system. She has set herself up with a good, if precarious, job; she connects with cisgender, heterosexual men; and she has a supportive family, as well as friends whose lives are moving toward a heteronormative family model. And yet, Information Age shows, in a system so committed to heterosexual violence, to one’s work above all else, and to enforcement of control over oppressed classes, no one is truly served. This woman can even imagine certain life trajectories stretching out in front of her, but some decisions have their own rhythm—they do not lend themselves to a deluge of information punctuated by humorous or chilling moments. Instead, they require a culture of care, and an ability to hold multiple priorities at once.

Reproduction and waged work are often positioned as being in conflict, as if one or the other must always dominate a woman’s life. Not only can they coexist, but for this protagonist, they are also part of the same set of considerations. This is both beautiful and taxing: women are expected to be both workers and mothers, ever stretching their capacity. Mothers and media have a long history of context collapse: the media is tasked with raising citizens, and mothers are tasked with mediating the outside world (to raise citizens). So a media worker considering her own reproduction is coming to terms both with how much of her life is about mediation and also with what she will mediate, and to what end.

This question of what to mediate becomes even more pressing when the venture capital money runs dry. Another slow crisis ensues: media layoffs, two weeks’ severance, time with family to regroup. The protagonist picks up odd jobs, stumbling around to find what she can curate or connect. The answer seems to be rooting around in the wreckage. She takes on a job researching the Biosphere, the largest closed-loop ecological system ever created, and its demise. Then, the inevitable arrives, and it’s hard not to cringe for the narrator when she takes on a role training a large language model on linguistic prompts:

The engineer describes how, from context, the bots can tell whether the word “bank” refers to a financial institution or to the side of a river.

I advance quickly through the linguistic prompts, and the entry-level pay is livable, somehow. The work engaging. I begin to wonder what this life might look like.

Do I feel more human than ever, correcting the automatons? I rank tones, provide feedback. Prompt the machines for nuance, detail, for more or less “voice.” In their answers, I separate what’s dangerous from what’s merely wrong, sort harmful error from innocuous misfire.

That the novel dwells constantly on the delights of miscommunication seems an argument against this kind of AI work, against the attempt to eradicate miscommunication. It especially seems so as the book’s publishing comes at a moment when these technologies are posited by many capitalists as the future of art itself. Predicting the most likely correct word, imagining context as a black-and-white phenomenon, and sorting desirable and undesirable language patterns may be useful tools for certain tasks, but they cannot replace the delight of the truly unexpected.

This new mode of creation holds its own ambivalences. The protagonist doesn’t necessarily hate her work; at times, she even feels that she is mediating (mothering) this new technology into being. She has done everything as close to “right” as is possible in this burning world, and the scaffolding still did not hold. The novel, in this way, narrates the generational mood of the millennial, what it feels like to bear an age of purported change and imperial growth and yet come out without the spoils that helped previous generations build heteronormative middle-class lives and families. But of course, this is a slow story, and survival in some memorable form is inevitable for many. Acts of care and love transcend, break, and remake preexisting forms of relation. When the narrator, in a new relationship and with a new job, reunites with her old boyfriend for a drink at the end of Information Age, she quips: “The way we’ll talk about our younger selves, it’s as though we’ll be their parents.” Maybe this is a new type of family: a woman and her friends and her work, and the child she used to be, and the children all around her.