99 Problems Finding the 1

G'Ra Asim is a professor and a punk musician, and he is single. In 2004 Jay-Z put out "99 Problems," a song cataloguing the troubles in his life while leaving romantic love off the list. Twenty-some years on, Asim has a list of his own, and every item on it has to do with dating and modern romance.

This book is his reflection on what he calls chronic lovelessness in the years after covid. He looks at his own stretch of singledom and his dating mishaps, and he proposes a remedy he calls "thinkful wishing," a way of examining love, romance and ambivalence in order to imagine a more loving and lovable future. The modest version of the goal is to find someone he could put down as his emergency contact.

Along the way, Asim mixes cultural critique with personal experience, writing as a millennial looking for a partner. He notes, for instance, that ascendant Black people seldom reach what he calls "cruising altitude," a stable professional plateau that leaves enough attention free to size up potential partners. Touring with his band, he also considers how stage banter relates to the awkwardness that lurks beneath social life.

At the center of the book is an argument that love, however problematic a favorite it may be, deserves to be reclaimed and redeemed. Asim contends that white supremacy complicates the project, and that bringing love back will mean giving up the pose of terminal cool and risking some earnestness.