“Like many another writer,” Thompson wrote, “Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid—like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.” But what happens when the premise on which these convictions are based changes too rapidly and unpredictably? How do writers whose perspectives have been forged by their experiences within a certain time and place adjust to a new reality—to “the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole?” In other words: how do you stay relevant when the moment in history you’re tasked with rendering is defined by a lack of clarity? “It is not just a writer’s crisis,” Thompson concluded, “but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.”