Keen On

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, praising the New York City diner who orders and eats several plates of the same pasta dish. On the one hand, Rothfeld’s embrace of mess is a polemic against Marie Kondo and her fetishization of tidiness and order; on the other, it’s a challenge to the stuffiness of an American coastal intelligentsia for whom smallness and moderation have become not just moral but also political virtues. Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post’s Book World. Before joining The Washington Post, she served as assistant literary editor of the New Republic and worked toward her PhD in philosophy at Harvard, where she focused on aesthetics and the history of philosophy. Her debut essay collection, ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL, is now out. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ mag