Musk’s Fascination With the Letter <em>X</em>

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Elon Musk has a long history with the letter X. What does it signify?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Moralism is ruining cultural criticism.
• The 2024 election could be the end of the cases against Donald Trump.
• The wrath of Goodreads
• American girlhood culture is really strange.

Solving for X

A few months ago, at the start of an unintended streak of reading novels with characters named X, I started to become curious about the letter. First, I read Richard Ford’s , in which the novel’s protagonist calls his ex-wife “X” as he narrates his version, the unnamed teen narrator refers to herself at one point as “Miss X.” And I recently started Catherine Lacey’s , in which a widow digs into the hazy past of her late wife, an artist known by the time of her death as “X.” These characters are all shot through with ambiguity; they are people who both invite and resist projection. But they also have nothing to do with one another. Why do they share the same name, or, really, the absence of a name?