04.19 | the choking churn of weekly columnizing

✉️ letter #62

While sorting through the backlog of “ideas” - blogs, articles, funny memes - I’d half-read and collected across the past month, I came across this fun and characteristically biting op-ed about op-eds from former Gawker alumni Hamilton Nolan. It echoed a complaint I’d snuck into my newsletter last week: how in the world do some people with absolutely nothing to say keep on getting themselves published?

🎼 the soundtrack | Canopy - Charlotte Day Wilson

The target of my ire was New Yorker columnist Nick Paumgarten, who I had first come across after reading a pretty dire attempt to connect Americans getting rid of their pandemic pets to the origins of COVID and the Yulin Dog Eating Festival in China. The logic thread he’d pulled to get from one to the other had been tenuous enough to be pretty racist - Yulin and Wuhan are two very far away places, and neither had anything to do with Americans abandoning their comfort animals. His most recent piece, about going to Vermont to watch the eclipse, wasn’t as bad… it just wasn’t interesting.

Turns out he wasn’t the only columnist struggling to make his experience of this year’s star natural phenomena into something worthwhile of a major publication. The desperately dull writer who caught Hamilton Nolan’s attention was Pamela Paul of the New York Times.

His not-so-gentle ribbing of her attempt at finding “a moment in unity” in “this shredded country” during the eclipse was kind of a glass house moment for me:

Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week...

The best columnists lean into their good ideas and minimize their output the rest of the time. Most columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery, spitting out work that is acceptable enough to fill space on a page, yet rarely worth taking the time to read.

I feel that. I’ve been proud of myself for being relatively consistent this year with pushing out a weekly letter to all of you, but I’m not going to pretend like it hasn’t been a struggle sometimes to think of something I actually want to say. I hope that whatever I do say on here isn’t so boring that you all end up hating me.

Then again, each of you are taking an active action of your own free will to open this email and, more importantly, nobody is paying me for these opinions, and even more importantly, I can stop when I want to. The columnists who spend week after week are sweating for ideas tend to be shackled to their prestige jobs - even if they’ve got bunk all on their mind, the gig is just too sweet to lose.

This isn’t even a gig for me, which I think is how it ought to be until I am somebody who somehow has an amazingly thoughtful idea every week. Meanwhile, Nolan points this out in a paragraph so acerbic in such a classically Gawker way that it fills my heart with glee:

The existence of these uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry is evidence of the limits of the ideals that liberal society purports to value. Sure, the institutions of journalism name truth and enlightenment and justice and equality as their goals, but the unspoken qualification, “within the pool of people who went to, at least, Brown,” is every bit as important as the more noble part that is spoken louder. There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?

Indeed. I'm making it my quote of the week.

🪢related threads

There are creators out there that somehow do manage to get on the hamster wheel weekly and still churn out consistently worthwhile insights though. Here's some of my favorites and things they've produced recently:

Kamea Chayne runs a podcast called Green Dreamer that has some of the most interesting philosophical conversations I've come across regarding environmentalism, conservation, and eco justice. A recent example is her conversation with anti-oppression activist Audra Mitchell on rethinking the limitations of "biodiversity" as a gauge of planetary well-being.
Audrey Watters has found a niche - Silicon Valley weirdness around health tech - and continually plumbs it for not just take-downs of bonkers bio-engineering theses but also charmingly intimate essays on how it relates to her own ongoing life. Her most recent piece is a meditative reflection on walking that pulls in mental health information, personal philosophy and family history.
Ann Friedman publishes a weekly newsletter that somehow always helps me discover at least one other amazing piece of writing on the interwebs. Here's herself talking about the changing definition of "gatekeeping" and its usefulness in modern discourse for The Cut.
And I can't really leave this section without mentioning Kaiser Kuo and Sinica, which in all transparency, I'm doing some work for. I wouldn't be doing work for him though if I didn't really admire what he was putting out into the world. The Sinica podcast is still publishing a thought-provoking conversation on modern (and sometimes historical) China every week. What's new and also well worth digesting is the weekly essays Kaiser is now writing too. This week's is a reflection on his history with China, the country and the concept.

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

I finally made it to the Metropolitan Opera this week! I had no idea we could get tickets for so cheap - basically all you have to do is log onto the Met Opera's rush tickets page at noon of the day the opera you want to see is playing, and then it's only $25 per whatever leftover as a seat. Ours were six rows from the stage, so really not bad at all!

We went to watch Angel Blue as Magda in Puccini's La Rondine:

As you might have seen me recap on my Instagram: I wasn’t familiar with this story, but found it pretty hilariously light, considering how tragic operas often go.

Basically a high-level courtesan sneaks out for an exciting night with Paris riffraff, shacks up for a passionate Riviera affair with a handsome but naive country boy, and freaks out when he tries to introduce her to his parents. Her final aria is like “It’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been acting like a sexy innocent damsel but I’m actually a sexy elegant lady of the night. 😝This was really fun, too bad so sad it’s ending, gtg back to my rich banker patron now. 😞 Remember me always, I’ll remember u~”

And finito.

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