My guest on this episode is Peter Counter. Peter is an author and culture critic whose first book was the essay collection Be Scared of Everything, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Walrus, Motherboard, Art of the Title, Electric Literature, and the anthology Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church. Peter’s most recent book is the memoir How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory, published by House of Anansi Press in 2023. Author and actor John Hodgman – he was the PC in those Apple vs PC commercials, fyi - called the book “a brilliant, humorous, heartbreaking examination of how certain events break our lives apart, and what we do with the pieces.”

Peter and I talk about what it’s like to be a culture critic in 2025, about the various forms his memoir took over the decade or so he was writing it and trying to get it published, and about my own envy over him getting John Hodgman to blurb his book.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

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