admiring the shade on somebody else's deck chair

Ta-Nehisi Coates effects another defense of The Atlantic internal to its machinery:

Over the years I've had writers come here and "work for exposure" with some regularity. My friend the historian Jelani Cobb has done yeoman's work, some of it based on actual reporting. Judah Grunsteinwas nice enough to allow me to publish an e-mail, which I thought had a lot of substance, as a piece.Aaron Schatz from Football Outsiders has been here. The great historian Thomas Sugrue has come into this space and done awesome work. So has Adam Serwer. So has Brendan Koerner. So has Ayelet Waldman. So has Mark Kleiman. So has Michael Chabon. So has Shani Hilton.Last year we brought historian Kate Masur, film critic A.O. Scott and writer Tony Horwitz together to discuss Lincoln. None of them were paid.

But, of course, all of them are now paid, and as far as I can tell, all of them were paid in other capacities when they worked for free. Again: this is not about where you came from. It is about where the people who have no money are right now. Everybody in this country has a "I came from nowhere" story. Some are facile and distorting. Others are poignant and constructive. But while I read and evaluate them all with interest, for this conversation, each is ultimately irrelevant to the person who needs to pay the rent.

Let's be clear, here: the Internet is absolutely full of people who work for exposure thinking that it will someday lead to dollars, only to find that it never does. And many of them are just as talented and dedicated as the people who make it professionally. You don't have to have as low of an opinion of our professional writing class as I do to admit that many of the people who write for the most prominent, well-paying places are inferior or indifferent prose stylists. Meanwhile, people work for exposure and work for exposure and work for exposure and they end up looking around at an empty apartment. I don't blame anyone on salary for failing to grok that, but it's reality.

One of the dynamics that's played out here is how hard it is to maintain a belief in the randomness and luck involved in success when you're talking about your own job. I know, from reading his work, that Coates doesn't believe that talent and drive lead unerringly to success. Far from it; in fact it's hard to think of someone who has done a better job of voicing the importance of chance in success. But some nontrivial portion of his readers are going to see him as saying exactly that he and the financially secure, celebrated people he mentions above are successful because of the quality of their work, their intelligence, their drive. Certainly, Alexis Madrigal's piece was pregnant with such pride. The bare calculus of winners and losers has attended this conversation at every step, and people who ordinarily know better have risked falling into a banal narrative about talent and work ethic. I have been reminded, in this conversation, by nothing as much as that tech writer who lectured Jamelle Bouie for "underestimating the hustle."

The flat reality is that the simplistic "exposure leads to dollars" formula is far less certain than we all might want, especially when the publications at the top of the chain, like The Atlantic, are looking to get people to do it for free. (Again: if The Atlantics of the world don't pay, in time, who will?) Exposure doesn't pay the rent. Look at Jacobin. They got a positive, buzzy write up in the most prominent newspaper of all. I'm so glad they did. But I'm also sure that they're still struggling. And unless you put actual money in their hands, the exposure is useless.

I'm not talking about the value of writing for no pay, or people who do it for love. It's not unusual for me to write 12,000 words in a given week, precisely none of which I'll be paid for. But I'm a full amateur, at least in the world of writing that we're talking about here, so that's irrelevant to the discussion. We're talking about the conditions for people who want to value and respect writing in part by doing it for a living. And we're talking about the importance of professional commentary and journalism. We're drenched in empty optimism about the world of arts and media in the digital age; people talk endlessly about some new golden age of media made for free and distributed for free. But the quality of this free culture is frequently avoided. There's a million short films on Vimeo which were painstakingly, lovingly crafted by dedicated people, and the vast majority of them are fucking awful. Lawrence of Arabia could never have been made by dedicated amateurs, nor could The Secret of Monkey Island, nor could Rubber Soul. And neither can the kind of journalism we deeply need.

I dunno. Predictions are bad business for an enterprise like this. It's hard not to worry for the future, and at times it's hard not to feel a little satisfaction. For awhile now, there's been a trope in paid commentary of "If you do X, you're a chump." With the financial crisis and the collapse of many job markets, it became a commonplace for bloggers to write mocking pieces about how people who have dedicated themselves to certain professions or fields were ensuring their own failure. (I guess there's clicks to be had in making people feel better about their own shitty deal.) As a PhD student, I've read more of those targeted towards me and people like me than I can count. Well, I think we're probably all chumps, now, and those same bloggers should keep their bags packed.

I thought that this conversation was about as good as it possibly could be, given the format and the culture of the people within. (Branch.com essentially exists for people to say "I AND THE OTHER PEOPLE IN THIS CHAT ARE VERY VERY IMPORTANT.") There's a lot of fear in there, and a lot of effort to not show that fear to the other people involved, which is certainly understandable. I doubt any of them individually thinks that they will be the one to end up on the outside, though. My useless prediction is that some large majority of them will not be writing or editing professionally ten years from now, and not by choice.

I can't feel anything but unhappiness about that. I don't want the world where most every piece from a professional publication is either clickbait garbage or "sponsored content." I don't need any more "The Fourteen Hottest Raccoon Twinks" or "Experts Say 7-11 Leads in Snacktacular Savings" in my life. But I fear I'm going to get it; I fear that's the future.

I think everybody in this conversation might just be whistling past the graveyard. But then, is that any different for the rest of us? I keep posting these charts and graphs, that show how deeply broken our basic deal is. Our system says that you must work and that work is central to who you are; meanwhile, work for the vast majority of us gets worse and worse and worse. So maybe we're all just fucked, not as writers, but as workers, as regular people.

Update: Two additional points, both from that Branch.com deal. First, several people tell stories about how some piece that they thought would get them know money got republished somewhere and ended up getting them money.... But anecdotes are memorable because they are rare, and none of these suggests anything like a sustainable model.

Second, somebody writes, "Agreed with Sara and Max w/r/t the troubling, self-perpetuating ubiquity and dominance of the shitty and slipshod. It's bleak to see insultingly artless, lame-unto-awful stuff -- in sports, where I spend most of my time, that's Bleacher Report -- dominate through sheer Google-gigging volume (and, now, adoptive corporate parentage), despite being widely unloved/loathed and mostly unlovable/loathsome."

Unloved by whom? By the people in that chat? For sure. By the people who click and generate the ad revenue? Seems not to be the case. And that's a deep problem here, conflicting notions of what is quality and what is valuable. That tension contributes to the sense I already identified in which these are people who know better than to claim that they are responsible for their own success and yet want to anyway. (As I sometimes do, as many of us sometimes do.) The sad fact is that the public may want "15 Gayest Pictures of the Pope" more than "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."

Read More

sticky wickets

I was chatting with somebody recently who was rebutting my take on social liberalism (that it's a deeply unhealthy movement right now) by pointing to gay marriage. Well, first, nine out of fifty states performing same-sex marriages does not strike me as great success yet! Although I do, of course, recognize the incredible progress that has occurred. In the broader sense, I actually think gay marriage proves my point. Gay marriage is a specific material goal, whether accomplished legislatively or through the judiciary, and one that we know when we have achieved. I don't doubt for a second that diminishing anti-gay bigotry has played a large role in making gay marriage more possible. But the specificity of the goal stands in a marked contrast to a lot of anti-racist and anti-sexist efforts. What's more, part of the beauty of enshrining gay rights is precisely that they render bigotry less powerful. I have no doubt that some people will remain (quietly) bigoted against gay men and women in perpetuity. But if they can access the full panoply of civil rights granted to heterosexuals, the relevance of that bigotry recedes dramatically.

How to navigate this interface between the personal and the material is, of course, a tangled and vexing question. I don't begrudge anyone difficulty in assessing this question, nor do I think that everyone has to have the same ideas about how to get from one to the other. But I do think it's important that at least some of your goals be the type where you know when you've met them. (Forgive that nightmare of a sentence.) I think it's very important to have a theory of change.

None of this is at all an insistence on keeping your goals realistic. I certainly could never make that argument! Indeed, narrowing the realm of acceptable politics to what seems narrowly realistic is a good way to prevent real change. Besides, "realistic" can be a rapidly changing quality. Again: when I graduated from high school, nobody wanted to hear about gay marriage. Even many of my family's gay friends didn't want to talk about it, for fear it would seem too extreme or militant. Things change. I'm not asking for realism in a short-term political sense. I'm asking for knowing victory when we see it.

Now, a lot of people I disagree with have, in fact, articulated a theory of change. They believe in the idea of the widening circle: that a group of people taking a very strong stance against sexism, racism, and homophobia will create a social expectation that certain attitudes, behaviors, and utterances are socially unacceptable. As time goes on, more and more people become aware of that expectation, they will find themselves within the circle, and will declare themselves part of it by participating in the expression of judgment against these behaviors. Over time, the circle grows to the point where most everyone with political power recognizes the realities of sexism, racism, homphobia, and privilege, and then works to address material or structural inequalities.

At this point, I don't think that this frame is working. I think the evidence against it is present both in the continued intractable racial inequalities we can statistically assess, and in a more anecdotal sense in which I perceive growing skepticism and resistance to social liberalism among people who are not within a certain social or demographic cohort. I think that the reason for this failure is partially explained in this post by Rich Juzwiak, though of course I don't claim to speak for him. The danger with the expanding circle is the potential that, rather than the circle actually expanding, its walls simply become higher and higher; rather than more and more people getting pulled inside, the people inside and the people outside become more and more divided. Each develops a deeper sense of resentment towards the other. More perniciously, those inside develop a social or cultural value in being separated. Because being inside the circle is associated with righteousness, and this righteousness provides social cachet, the incentive is not to draw more people into the circle but to keep them out. And without intending to, essays like the one Juzwiak criticizes become more and more oriented towards elevating people within the inner circle-- and in so doing, make being within the circle less appealing or possible to those who most need to be convinced. When I watch people showily and ritualistically displaying offense on Twitter, I observe exactly this dynamic.

I do, however, recognize that some of my own resentment against those engaging in that outrage cycle colors my perception of their motives, which is never a good thing when trying to get to the truth.

Whatever the case, whether the goal is primarily material or primarily emotional or anywhere in between, I would like a new focus on theories of change. I would like for the people expressing indignity about bigotry or insensitivity-- whether perfectly enlightened or perfectly misguided-- to better express how their discourse can actually contribute to positive change. I don't need political argument to be effective to be worth engaging in. (If I did, I'd have nothing to say.) But I do want people to be more clear about whether they're approaching success, how they would know success if they got there, and what a long-term strategy might look like.

Read More

oh, the gravitas

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 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.

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.

Read More

Rand Paul's filibuster

So this will surprise no one, but I can't fail to mark the occasion: Rand Paul, generally, is horribly wrong about the best course for the United States, and someone whose domestic agenda would be ruinous for our country, and especially its most vulnerable. But on the issue of executive overreach, civil liberties, and the limitless projection of military force-- of which drones are but one small part-- he's completely right. He deserves credit for what he's doing, from anyone who believes in restraining the government, the rule of law, and the equal value of all human life.

If you can't separate his deeply wrong positions from this enlightened one, you are either an imbecile or a deluded partisan, and in either case, you are a detriment to your country and its democracy. All of the great crimes of humanity have been committed by some but permitted by many more, people who may not have supported the actions in question, but who collaborated, who justified, who dissembled, or merely ignored. At some point, you have to take a stand, and if a stand against what our country's foreign policy has become must emerge from a man who is wrong about everything else, so be it.

Read More

Cord Jefferson:Hugo Chavez::Bill O'Reilly:Barack Obama

“And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?"

- Bill O'Reilly, Election Night 2012.

"Throughout it all, glimpses of Chávez's benevolence—gifts of new refrigerators and apartments to poor voters around election time, thanks to the state's oil riches—were generally enough to keep the president's ratings afloat and his head off a coup's chopping block."

- Cord Jefferson, yesterday

O'Reilly's position was, rightly, declared exceptionally ugly, an statement of bigoted condescension that insisted that  Hispanic people, black people, and women couldn't possibly vote for Obama for any reason other than the fact that he was going to "give them stuff." Cord Jefferson is here employing precisely the same logic: the people of Venezuela could not possibly be smart enough to actually believe in the socialist policies of Hugo Chavez, so they must merely have supported Chavez out of bribery. The thinking is identical. Absolutely identical.

Of course, Bill O'Reilly knows who he is. Jefferson believes himself to be some sort of a progressive. But when push comes to shove, he's more than happy to sneer down at the people in Venezuela and insist that he knows better than they do what they want and what is good for them. In the language of Jefferson's milieu, that would be called privilege. I would simply call it bigotry, and in Jefferson's case, bigotry of the most hypocritical kind.

Read More

hilarious, in that depressing way

So there's the expected orgy of liberal Seriousness going on about the death of Hugo Chavez. I would merely point out that a lot of the self-same people who recently spoke out against privilege are now lecturing Venezuelans about their late president and what is best for their country. Perhaps they should pause and think it over.

Update: See anti-privilege warrior Cord Jefferson for the Platonic form of this sort of thing.

Update II: The spasm of Chavez coverage, in the next few days, is going to be absolutely hilarious. You're going to get such nakedness, such purity, in what people actually are, when push comes to shove.

Read More

it turns out that class matters

I've been doing this for 5 years or so now, and I still have a limited capacity to predict what things I write will be considered offensive or "out of line" by the jet set. For example: I am still surprised that people get worked up when I point out that the socioeconomic conditions of a writer and his or her upbringing deeply influence their analysis. My example is usually education. When you read the professional opinion writers, you're constantly encountering discussions of education that seem not to realize that failure is a likely outcome in education. They seem not to understand, at all, that willpower alone means essentially nothing for solving our ed problems. Why? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that so many of the people in our media grew up upper middle class or upper class. They've shuffled from preschool for gifted kids to expensive Montessori private elementary schools to elite private academies to Ivy League colleges. They don't know that educators and education can fail because they've never been exposed to anything but educational success.

That seems pretty elementary and entirely anodyne. But when I've said it in the past, the reaction has been as if I kicked somebody's dog. I broke some sort of code in bringing up the upbringing of people in professional media.

So take this response by Matt Yglesias to Nate Thayer. You might say to yourself, why, this person is remarkably callous about the ability of a broad swath of people to earn enough money to live. Why is he being so glib about other people's professional lives, which is to say, their ability to secure material security for themselves and their families? Well, it's much easier to understand when you realize that Yglesias's father is a millionaire and that he grew up in great material comfort. He's never had to choose between putting gas in the car or going to the doctor. He's never been desperately afraid about paying the rent. He just doesn't know. And it colors a lot of his writing.

Now, perhaps the problem is that people read some sort of furious critique into this. It happens that I think Yglesias should think things through a little more deeply, for reasons both of human compassion and to improve his analysis. (He might, for example, ponder the fact that Tyler Cowen has a regular salaried job, making his situation wholly irrelevant to the concerns of a freelancer like Thayer.) What I am not doing, however, is saying that Yglesias is history's greatest monster, or that he shouldn't be read, or that I'd like to punch him in the groin. I don't begrudge Yglesias his secure upbringing; indeed, that's what we're working for, for more people to get access to that kind of security. I'm saying that he's being his usual short-sighted self, and that you should read his work with interest but also with an appropriate skepticism. I am also saying that perhaps he should endeavor to think a little more outside of his own particular class consciousness. You should also read me with an appropriate skepticism about my own biases.

However, if this post attracts attention, it is guaranteed to engender a response that acts as if what I said is as bad as saying that Yglesias fucks children. Just speaking from experience here.

Read More