I have a relationship of mutual antagonism towards many people in the world of professional political writing and commentary. This isn’t personal, though some think it is, but rather a reflection of my criticisms of the basic economic incentives of professional writing in its current era. For this reason, I often don’t know how to express admiration for other writers, as I don’t want to damn them through association. But I’ll risk that and say that Yasmin Nair is a brilliant writer who does not have a platform worthy of her skills, as great as her blog is, and if you are an editor or publisher who is looking to bring a seasoned, articulate, provocative voice to your publication, I think you should consider paying Yasmin to write for you.

In late 2013 I wrote a piece about my favorite online writers. (I really loved writing it so check it out.) I named Yasmin in that piece, and wrote that she’s

“a brilliant observer, someone whose work demonstrates a profound, lived-in familiarity with politics, with political people, with the city. She reminds me, in the best way, of the old alternative weeklies, the Voice or the Reader, crabby old Jewish columnists who just seemed to know everything, to have experienced everything. In a world of left-wing discourse that has become enamored with a kind of shit-eating tween preciousness, Nair’s voice is serious without being dour, and playful without being cute. Her writing is invested with quiet, unfussy power.”

I stand by all of that. If you want a flavor of what she can do, check out her wonderful piece on shit for the Awl. It reflects what Yasmin brings to the table: deep research chops, exquisitely controlled prose, and a unique political sensibility that balances passion with experience and wisdom.

It’s a strange time for online writing. On the one hand, as I wrote not too long ago, it’s really, really hard to make it as a writer in this environment. There are really deep structural issues of scale and infinite supply of online advertising space and an enculturated rejected of monetization efforts. At the same time, some people are getting rich, riding a wave of VC cash. I don’t begrudge anyone who gets paid. (Get paid, young soldiers, get paid.) But there’s a sense in which professional online writing is suffering from both too little money and too much. Essentially nobody believes that everything is healthy but nobody is quite sure what healthy looks like.

Well, from the perspective of this low-traffic blogger, a more healthy place would be one where Yasmin has a prominent platform that pays her fair value for her writing. Yasmin is an inspiration to those who think that those who write for professional publications should be paid. I have turned down an awful lot of textbook companies, online magazines, and various content aggregators who have asked me to write for them for free or to republish my work for free in the last few years, and I have always had Yasmin’s voice in the back of my head when I have done so. She always says: writing is labor, so pay the writers. And she’s right. Writers are an interesting species: they typically have self-obsession in spades but lack for self-respect. Yasmin is the antidote to that sickness.

I have a cynical perspective on the whole industry of journalism and punditry, but I can still recognize better and worse. One of the things that aggravates me is that there is a constant call for original, provocative writing voices, and yet I know of original and provocative writers who aren’t courted by the people making this complaint. The fact is that there are certain kinds of provocation that they call for, but the world of writing and opinion is so much broader than that. Yasmin is known for her relentless and sharp criticism of “Big Gay,” the capitalist, revenue-generating, functionally conservative industry that has arisen from the good intentions of the gay rights movement. A committed opponent of seeing gay marriage as some sort of panacea for queer people, Yasmin has always thumbed her nose at groups like the Human Rights Campaign that dilute radical queer politics and turn the movement for queer rights and queer respect into a neutered funding mechanism for the Democrats. She’s been at this task for a long, long time, and her critique is informed by time, reading, and engagement.

Yet it’s for that reason, I think, that she may not have the regular publishing opportunities her work deserves. Because she is actually provocative, provoking a kind of thinking that is uncomfortable for establishment liberals, leftists, and conservatives alike, rather than just symbolically provocative, the way many writers are. A queer woman of color writing at a time when many publications claim to want to diversify, Yasmin reaps little benefit, as she has so forcefully rejected a brand of identity politics that she sees as antithetical to structural critique. She is, in other words, less read and celebrated because of her integrity and her unconventional thinking.

So: if you’re a publication that needs writing, and you would like to find writers who combine rich prose with deep and unorthodox thinking and a genuinely unique sensibility, I highly, highly recommend you get in touch with Yasmin Nair. You might not think much of my work, but I recognize heat, and Yasmin throws it. So take advantage of a market inefficiency, capitalists. She’ll be worth every penny.