DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (INTRO)

By: Adam McGovern
April 1, 2025

There’s no accounting for taste, but we tend to keep detailed ledgers. What we like and dislike, in a culture that’s traditionally more attuned to personal choice than political alignment, is closely associated with who we think we are, or want to see ourselves as. The consumer goods, entertainment products, and ways of living we select and reject define us; our likes are entwined, we think, with what we are like.

That is why we can spend years or lifetimes resisting what we feel does not fit the profile, even if it calls to us strongly or surrounds us powerfully.

We spend more time than ever shutting out cultural phenomena we feel belong to a different generation, or pastimes that are the province of a different ideological camp (“red” and “blue” demographics are bitterly entrenched; we’ve all finally started veering back from a nation of markets to one of politics, but we’ve taken our customer identities with us).

So it’s time to listen to — or watch, or eat, or live — what we didn’t accept, or secretly did but had no context for. We all have tastes or views that evolve, but this isn’t just about trying a new dish or sitcom but expanding the range of what we even perceive as part of our world.

DEFER Your Enthusiasm is a catalogue of what you didn’t notice, or skipped intentionally; music or movies or TV shows or artistic moments or social trends you missed when they first emerged, or avoided when they were at their height. I asked 25 of my favorite (re)thinkers to consider the craze, clique, or creation that’s become their greatest late-breaking obsession.

It can be as simple as rediscovering what you didn’t know about in the first place, as Jim Maloy does with a 1975 pop album he can now put in its own historical context as well as his. Or, it can be Carlo Rotella’s long-delayed acquiescence to an earworm — and the cultural accessories to it that seemed too easy for its fans yet unreachable to him at the time — in learning to stop worrying and love “What You Won’t Do for Love”.

Juan Recondo finds new meanings in a revisited childhood text, while Miranda Mellis rejects an author’s whole oeuvre sight-unseen that she’s now read every word of.

Younger loved ones open Mandy Keifetz’s eyes to millennia of Judaism, and Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons’ to the era of Taylor Swift; while younger selves give way to let Heather Quinlan see the appeal of the Dead, and Rani Som to find the subtext in Led Zep. Gabriela Pedranti is late to discover that Big Bang Theory’s tribe has something surprisingly specific to say to hers.

Illustration by Rani Som. Click for larger version.

Mileage can vary in closely adjacent lanes; Jeff Lewonczyk saw Twin Peaks as the restricted province of the older and hipper, while for Nikhil Singh, Lynch’s overall oeuvre was a suppressed presence sought out surreptitiously over years.

Jake Zucker shot right past Paul Schrader’s little-known Light Sleeper, while Christopher-Rashee Stevenson drifted away from Eugene O’Neill to find later harbor in his obscure youthful one-acts. I encountered a late-life love of dogs, while Fran Pado found that events had rekindled a forgotten obsession with sharks.

Tana Sirois uncovers disregarded knowledge that every earthling could stand to share; Mimi Lipson considers the old worlds left behind and new ones opened by personal sobriety.

Holly Interlandi brings us on her long odyssey toward and away from hot sauce; Art Wallace literally revisits a Michigan he both does and doesn’t recognize; Josh Glenn takes a second look and sees the virtues of visual art.

And as of this writing, there are still a few more to surface! DEFER Your Enthusiasm is about the thrill of rediscovery and the rewards of devotion delayed. Join us for our first-ever enjoyment of the second time around.

Series lineup:

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DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (INTRO)

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