I've had to apologize, publicly and in writing, more than my fair share. If you're really apologizing, there's three parts: what I said was wrong; I shouldn't have said it; and I'm sorry. Those three parts.
The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, James Bennet, responded to Nate Thayer the other day with what could serve as a model for how to not really apologize. He literally ends it with, "We're sorry we offended him." If it isn't abundantly clear: James Bennet is saying "fuck you" to Nate Thayer with that fake apology. And he's saying "fuck you" in a way that is intended to sound magnanimous, as if there is some sort of charity being proffered in the editor of the esteemed Atlantic apologizing to a lowly freelancer. Now, were this an alternative universe where The Atlantic might hire someone like me, and I saw that nonapology being published under my magazine's masthead, I would feel embarrassment and shame. Genuine shame. I have no problem with going after someone, or with someone going after me. But when you fight, you fight honestly, and you drop pretense. When you apologize, you do it for real, or you don't do it at all.
Yet despite the great shame and embarrassment I would personally feel, Alexis Madrigal apparently felt moved to wax poetic about how great The Atlantic is, how great its tradition is, and how great the editorial culture is. I read it, and I have some idea of what Madrigal is trying to do. But everything about it is self-defeating. Every aspect of his piece makes the situation more insulting (to me, at least), not less. All of it makes The Atlantic seem more imperious, more arrogant, more cloistered, more sanctimonious, more self-celebratory. Madrigal is trying to do right. But his perception of the gravitas of his own publications infects everything he does.
The first big problem comes up front: the long "I came up from the streets, eating catfood and selling weed to make my way in the cut-throat world of writing, so I know the struggle" section at the beginning-- those never, ever work. Good intentions and all, they just don't work. In an essay full of false notes, that's the falsest of them all. It sounds condescending and it sounds fake, even if it's all true. And it does because it's intended for people who are interested in paying the rent and feeding their kids. Your supposed struggle is written in the past tense, and so it is useless to the people who write about theirs in present. The intention is good, and I'm sure he's telling the truth. But nobody cares what you once were. They care that you get a check every other week and they don't. That's reality. Grasp it.
Also, again: The Atlantic never stops talking about what a great, profitable success it is. Never. Tell your marketing department to shut the fuck up, or stop crying poverty. One or the other.
Understand: this is a class issue. It's roiling with old-fashion, ugly, class resentment. Madrigal's post, for all of its hand-waving and all of his efforts to identify with Thayer, is the words of someone who is secure lecturing someone who is not secure. And precisely because he's secure, he mistakes Olga Khazan's feelings as more important than the actual material security of all of the freelancers who live precarious lives. Khazan is employed. Her emotions can take it. That effort to protect the nice lady at the office might be sexist or it might just be generally misguided, but either way, it mistakes an adult professional for a damsel in distress.
The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, James Bennet, responded to Nate Thayer the other day with what could serve as a model for how to not really apologize. He literally ends it with, "We're sorry we offended him." If it isn't abundantly clear: James Bennet is saying "fuck you" to Nate Thayer with that fake apology. And he's saying "fuck you" in a way that is intended to sound magnanimous, as if there is some sort of charity being proffered in the editor of the esteemed Atlantic apologizing to a lowly freelancer. Now, were this an alternative universe where The Atlantic might hire someone like me, and I saw that nonapology being published under my magazine's masthead, I would feel embarrassment and shame. Genuine shame. I have no problem with going after someone, or with someone going after me. But when you fight, you fight honestly, and you drop pretense. When you apologize, you do it for real, or you don't do it at all.
Yet despite the great shame and embarrassment I would personally feel, Alexis Madrigal apparently felt moved to wax poetic about how great The Atlantic is, how great its tradition is, and how great the editorial culture is. I read it, and I have some idea of what Madrigal is trying to do. But everything about it is self-defeating. Every aspect of his piece makes the situation more insulting (to me, at least), not less. All of it makes The Atlantic seem more imperious, more arrogant, more cloistered, more sanctimonious, more self-celebratory. Madrigal is trying to do right. But his perception of the gravitas of his own publications infects everything he does.
The first big problem comes up front: the long "I came up from the streets, eating catfood and selling weed to make my way in the cut-throat world of writing, so I know the struggle" section at the beginning-- those never, ever work. Good intentions and all, they just don't work. In an essay full of false notes, that's the falsest of them all. It sounds condescending and it sounds fake, even if it's all true. And it does because it's intended for people who are interested in paying the rent and feeding their kids. Your supposed struggle is written in the past tense, and so it is useless to the people who write about theirs in present. The intention is good, and I'm sure he's telling the truth. But nobody cares what you once were. They care that you get a check every other week and they don't. That's reality. Grasp it.
Also, again: The Atlantic never stops talking about what a great, profitable success it is. Never. Tell your marketing department to shut the fuck up, or stop crying poverty. One or the other.
Understand: this is a class issue. It's roiling with old-fashion, ugly, class resentment. Madrigal's post, for all of its hand-waving and all of his efforts to identify with Thayer, is the words of someone who is secure lecturing someone who is not secure. And precisely because he's secure, he mistakes Olga Khazan's feelings as more important than the actual material security of all of the freelancers who live precarious lives. Khazan is employed. Her emotions can take it. That effort to protect the nice lady at the office might be sexist or it might just be generally misguided, but either way, it mistakes an adult professional for a damsel in distress.
The best essay I read last year-- bar none-- was Moe Tkakic's "Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic." Hard to recall a more fitting combination of writer and target: Tcakic's brutal style is tailor-made for the kind of self-flattery that The Atlantic never stops reveling in. You probably think I enjoy saying that, but I don't. I like a lot of the people who write there-- Conor Friedersdorf, Derek Thompson, Andrew Cohen.... Here's Ta-Nehisi Coates writing something great, and here's Garance Franke-Ruta writing poignantly about AIDS activism. I don't like having to constantly flog this horse. But stuff like that "apology" just makes it impossible to avoid.
There's good writers and good writing there. But the editorial ethos and self-promotion of the magazine is just insufferable. You take the worst parts of today's facile belief in ascendancy-through-technology, then add no-bullshit Kennebunk-style American old money aristocrat unearned arrogance, and you've got The Atlantic's institutional character. Think of the absolute worst aspects of navel-gazing neoliberal dynamic synergistic TED-talk digital utopianiasm, and marry it to some old asshole talking about when the busboys used to be grateful for a nickel tip, and there you go. That's The Atlantic's ethos as revealed in Bennet's nonapology. And that's the character Madrigal celebrates.
This is the message that must be delivered: nobody gives a shit about your gravitas. Nobody cares that you used to publish Mark Twain. Nobody. Cares. You guys know that you're not actually Mark Twain, right? Yes, you published "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." Now, you publish "check out the coolest-looking dolphin." That's fine. If that's what the editors feel your magazine has to become, fine. But please. Spare me the snobbery. You don't get to name-check Thurgood Marshall while a senior editor can post four gifs, including one of a chimpanzee bashing a log against a rock, and call it writing, or journalism, or American letters. You don't get both.
When Madrigal lists the ways you can make money on content, he of course leaves off a prominent one: publishing advertising that is explicitly designed to look like editorial content, sold at great cost to corporate entities, with the implicit business model that some portion of readers will mistake it for journalism. I don't mistake this for a problem that is unique to The Atlantic, and I certainly understand that paying writers first means paying the bills. But that, too, is a choice that undermines any claim to the honorable past. The magazine behind the Scientology advertorial has made its past a casualty of its present, and it's that incongruity that makes this situation so infuriating. It's the same dynamic that convinces James Bennet that in tendering that nonapology, he's offering some sort of generosity. In all cases, the echoes of what a place once was drown out the voice that says, "don't be an asshole."
I expect James Bennet to remain an asshole, and a very well-remunerated, secure one. But if Alexis Madrigal is as serious as he seems about having solidarity for other writers, I would ask this: drop all of that gravitas bullshit. Eliminate that from your vocabulary. Never mention all the important people and important pieces that have been run in your magazine before. Forget they exist. That's the past. Because when you then turn around and post captioned cat pictures and get paid decently for doing so, while offering $0.00 to people trying to produce something of substance, it twists the knife. What people are mourning now is a vision of a particular writing life, a particular commitment to something like the serious, the transcendent, or the true. To want to be a certain sort of professional writer is to want to care about the things worth caring about, to document them, to tell the truth about them. That vision has been sacrificed in the name of personal branding, "content," aggregation, monetization, and something frequently referred to as the future. As a consumer, I take no joy in seeing a magazine like yours becoming a repository for Jennifer Hathaway gifs. Let me feel disappointment without telling me how great your job is. What people are asking for is the right to mourn something that is rapidly dying.
Like Paul Carr says, there's a choice to be made. I can't and won't begrudge the people who choose their publication's continued existence, even if it makes existence ceaselessly shallow. Just fess up. For the sake of compassion and for the benefit of clarity, recognize: you are all BuzzFeed now.
When Madrigal lists the ways you can make money on content, he of course leaves off a prominent one: publishing advertising that is explicitly designed to look like editorial content, sold at great cost to corporate entities, with the implicit business model that some portion of readers will mistake it for journalism. I don't mistake this for a problem that is unique to The Atlantic, and I certainly understand that paying writers first means paying the bills. But that, too, is a choice that undermines any claim to the honorable past. The magazine behind the Scientology advertorial has made its past a casualty of its present, and it's that incongruity that makes this situation so infuriating. It's the same dynamic that convinces James Bennet that in tendering that nonapology, he's offering some sort of generosity. In all cases, the echoes of what a place once was drown out the voice that says, "don't be an asshole."
I expect James Bennet to remain an asshole, and a very well-remunerated, secure one. But if Alexis Madrigal is as serious as he seems about having solidarity for other writers, I would ask this: drop all of that gravitas bullshit. Eliminate that from your vocabulary. Never mention all the important people and important pieces that have been run in your magazine before. Forget they exist. That's the past. Because when you then turn around and post captioned cat pictures and get paid decently for doing so, while offering $0.00 to people trying to produce something of substance, it twists the knife. What people are mourning now is a vision of a particular writing life, a particular commitment to something like the serious, the transcendent, or the true. To want to be a certain sort of professional writer is to want to care about the things worth caring about, to document them, to tell the truth about them. That vision has been sacrificed in the name of personal branding, "content," aggregation, monetization, and something frequently referred to as the future. As a consumer, I take no joy in seeing a magazine like yours becoming a repository for Jennifer Hathaway gifs. Let me feel disappointment without telling me how great your job is. What people are asking for is the right to mourn something that is rapidly dying.
Like Paul Carr says, there's a choice to be made. I can't and won't begrudge the people who choose their publication's continued existence, even if it makes existence ceaselessly shallow. Just fess up. For the sake of compassion and for the benefit of clarity, recognize: you are all BuzzFeed now.
If you can't process all of that, then process this: an editor at your magazine, writing from a place of incredible privilege and good fortune, was rude. Rather than articulate an actual apology, your editor-in-chief wrote a defensive, shitty, arrogant half-apology. Now you've exacerbated it by writing thousands of words of justification and excuses. If you really want your publication to have class rather than merely asserting its class, here's all you say: we were wrong, we shouldn't have said it, we're sorry.
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