Greif wants to meddle in our lives, not just for the sake of the collective good, but for the sake of the individual, for your sake, to make sure that you do the serious thinking necessary to achieve self-fulfillment...Advising his readers on how to lead their best lives, Greif can sound like a perversely sophisticated inspirational thinker or self-help author ... The masterful ease with which Greif escorts his readers through the steps of his arguments can sometimes obscure his constant jumps from one genre of discourse to another.

The essays have a habit of changing direction in midair, sticking the landing as earnest entreaties for change ... The book succeeds on the strength of its deadpan and sometimes disarmingly bizarre humor. It’s especially important that most of the laughs come at Greif’s expense ... The essays come off not as posturing, but as the exertions of a formidable mind using every tool at its disposal for what Greif considers an all-important task.

...this collection decodes subjects both Hi and Lo, from the meaning of life and the philosophy of contemporary warfare to the implications of rap and reality television ... There is more than a whiff of the student Marxist in him, but instead of narrowing his view, this slightly censorious impulse lets him see things most of us prefer to overlook ... There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn’t have a kernel of interest at its core, even if his prose frequently bristles with abstractions ... In our dumbed-down, social-media-­driven age, Against Everything embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral and personable.

Greif’s collection of essays is full of surprises, not least that it is, at least in part, concerned with that old fashioned question of how to live. 'It’s a book of critique of things I do,' he writes in the preface. But instead of being the kind of self-help book that tells you 'how to do the things you are supposed to do, but better,” it “asks about those things you are supposed to do.' But this doesn’t capture everything Greif is up to in this politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny book. Over the course of the essays – which were first published in n+1, the journal he co-founded in 2004 – he covers the significance of exercise, our relationship with food, the meaning of hip-hop music, Radiohead, the figure of the hipster, society’s sexualisation of children, and war. Although he’s vexed, even depressed, by many aspects of contemporary culture he analyses, he stops short of pessimism, and the essays rarely conclude without opening at least some minute window of possibility. Greif doesn’t tell you everything is great – far from it – but rather than merely sketch the bars of the prison he seems deeply concerned with how it can be escaped.

Mark Greif composed the essays in his 2016 collection, Against Everything, over the ten-year span during which Donald Trump consolidated his place in the popular imagination... To read Greif in the aftermath of Trump’s victory is to marvel at the sharpness of his powers of observation, the fineness of his moral vision — and to understand more clearly how the American intelligentsia misjudged the Trump phenomenon ...its scope is wide and quotidian even as its focus in each essay is granular... Each essay is animated by the conviction Greif articulates in his preface: that many of the reasons for our most common — and so, perhaps, most important — habits, are wrong; that there are deeper, often troubling, impulses motivating us ...values that are not only antithetical to the prevailing cultural trends in the United States, but also diametrically opposed to those Donald Trump traffics in and symbolizes.

[These] strange, uncategorizable essays 'nobody would want to publish' remain, along with the early writing of Elif Batuman, the most distinguished, original, and consequential body of work to have come out of n+1’s first decade ... Greif’s work is almost overpopulated with relevant antecedents. Though his prose is often handsome, and always funny, it never feels effortless; n+1 is known, even now, for the rigor of its editorial apparatus, and his paragraphs bear signs of the labor that must have gone into the smooth consolidation of such diverse debts.

None of this would work at all if Greif weren't funny, which he is. Not so much when he attempts a wry turn of phrase, but in the overall character he creates in himself — and it is a character ... There is something clownish about trying to live according to existential principles in a world made of actually existing conflicts. But clowns serve many of the same purposes as philosophers, and sometimes they're hard to tell apart. I think Greif, for one, is more Larry David than Slavoj Zizek.