Obviously, I have a bunch of complaints about professional politics and culture writing. But one complaint I see floating around just doesn’t jibe with my experience at all. I frequently read people saying (often on Facebook) that “nobody knows how to write these days,” that the web writing generation doesn’t have the prose chops that […]
Continue reading →Like most everybody, I found this New Yorker article by Emily Nussbaum an unusually sharp piece from a preternaturally sharp writer. In it, Nussbaum considers not just paid advertising and product placement in TV, but TV’s relationship to commerce, and art’s in general, and ours to art and commerce and commerce in art. As I often […]
Continue reading →A few times now I’ve praised a couple of pieces by Grantland’s Bryan Curtis, in which he reflects on the sudden way in which social progressivism became the default orientation of mainstream sports commentary. In one of the pieces, Curtis writes “Something pretty interesting has happened to sports opinionating in recent years…. A certain opinion — and I’d […]
Continue reading →Here are the four gentlemen who are in charge of beloved sadkid blog The Awl. So: which of these gentlemen strikes you as the picture of quintessential masculinity? (Note: Balk picture may not be Balk. Who knows.) The correct answer, of course, is “that question is fucking gross and reactionary and terrible and you should […]
Continue reading →You can be a writer with a conscience; but if the publication you write for has a revenue model based on advertising alone, I’m not sure how you can act in a way consonant with your conscience. You can start a publication with a specific politics; but the drive to secure eyeballs has no politics. […]
Continue reading →A friend of mine Gchatted me this Benjamin Wallace-Wells profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates. She said, “congrats! You have the closest thing to a negative word in the whole piece.” But the quote, it turns out, is about his commenters. I tend to disappoint people in that way. Some have come to me looking for a […]
Continue reading →As I and others have written about endlessly (and as you’re likely bored of hearing), the curious economics of online politics and culture writing leads to too much and too little at the same time. We produce a huge amount of content because hitting click targets requires endless churn, particularly given the need to stay on […]
Continue reading →I’m working on a piece right now for another publication. I’m excited about it and hope to be able to share it soon. Below, you’ll find a section that the editor and I decided didn’t really fit with the rest of the piece. It’s a few recommendations in categories that are traditionally associated with the […]
Continue reading →I have been something of a critic of our professional online writing industry for some time, and I have never been shy about criticizing the people who work in it. Chief among my complains is that online writing is a culture that thinks it isn’t one — that is, our class of online writing professionals […]
Continue reading →So I could go on at length about this hatchet job about me in Tablet, but there’s really not much point: almost nothing that John-Paul Pagano writes has anything to do with what I actually believe or what I’ve actually argued. The essay is simply one misrepresentation after another, a string of deliberate misreadings and strawman […]
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