Nelson is our day’s ur-thinker for nuance, our own private Susan Sontag. She calls her method “thinking out loud with others,” for she quotes liberally from other writers. It makes her text a rich palimpsest, dense with significance. A phrase is introduced—for example, “freedom and fun,” from the founder of the Proud Boys description of the group’s mission—and then the phrase is re-used in multiple contexts serving to connect those contexts—like an ideational version of T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.”
