"Mailer, Updike, Roth-the Great Male Narcissists* who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it."
The video is not great, but the content. From the summary:
"In spite of forty years as a mathematician, I have difficulty describing these problems, even to myself, in a simple, cogent and concise manner that makes it clear what is wanted and why. As a possible, but only partial, remedy I thought I might undertake to explain them to a lay audience."
masterful understatement imo