PanBuzzfeed... instead of documenting her life experiences, something at which she excels, Daum spends far more time arguing over simplified conservative and liberal talking points, exposing her blind spots to the current issues that color our experience: race, gender, capitalism, the internet, and power ... Daum wrestles with \'both sides\' of issues in a manner that she would classify as the pursuit of nuance, but too often she just ends up seeming out of touch with people’s everyday lives and excessively attuned to arguments on the interne ... Daum oversimplifies constantly ... Daum is all over the place, arguing against one strawman after the next from a perspective that ends up feeling blinkered ... She’s a bit obsessed with ironic feminism, in fact, citing memes that are nearly a decade old (She mentions \'confused Betty White\' GIFs so often that I’m convinced we’re not on the same internet) ... By writing that current feminism is angry, Daum’s arguments have more than a whiff of maternalistic condescension ... What’s frustrating about Meghan Daum is that, ultimately, she is a good writer...But the aimlessness throughout The Problem With Everything is confusing...Exploring \'both sides\' is an obsession that doesn’t feel particularly useful or urgent. It seems to me that these times call for action rather than intellectual hedging ... For the first time, Daum’s writing feels evanescent, and that’s because she’s solely interrogating the online world, and not herself. At the heart of things, these incoherent arguments seem to be someone wanting — despite their best instincts — to connect.
Charles D'Ambrosio
RaveFlavorwireLoitering ... is an exciting essay collection because it takes ideas and heady, essayistic topics — whales, hell houses, the overused, wheezing corpse of J.D. Salinger — and it manages to make something new out of them ... Every one is a pleasure, diamond-cut and sharp in its incisive observations on how to be a human ...D’Ambrosio is a fluid stylist, able to turn a sentence so it hits you in the heart...tossed off so casually that he makes writing this well look easy. But he’s also a strikingly emotional writer, willing to plumb the depths of male feeling and male relationships in his work ... A topic like the work of J.D. Salinger feels so tiring, overworked, already talked about to death — but the care and tenderness that the writer shows towards the sensitivity in Salinger’s work, and how that fits in with D’Ambrosio’s own troubles and difficulties, is moving. There’s a vulnerability and tenderness here that takes what could be just an essay about a writer that you could nearly write yourself into another level. It’s one of the highlights of Loitering, but it’s just one note in a murderer’s row of essays that, in their own way, manage to crack the world open, leaving you blinking in the light.
