Something remarkable is happening in literature right now, and it's not what you'd expect. While we obsess over AI and digital transformation, writers and readers are turning toward the most analog experiences imaginable: taking baths in kitchens, learning existentialism through embroidery, savoring the mathematical beauty hidden in Van Gogh's brushstrokes.
This isn't nostalgia—it's rebellion. Against the tyranny of efficiency, the cult of productivity, the endless scroll. Literature is leading a handmade revival that celebrates the messy, the slow, the deliberately imperfect.
Consider the recent celebration of "kitchen baths"—that luxurious act of soaking in a tub placed right in the heart of domestic life. As one writer puts it, there's something "extremely gay" about this practice, using "gay" in its original sense: joyful, carefree, delightfully excessive.