Perhaps There Can Be No Ombudsman

I've gone soft

I’ve said in this space before that I have a hard time listening to podcasts, thanks to my meds, but this past week I drove to Washington DC and back and had a lot of time to kill. I ended up listening to episodes of the Longform podcast, which I used to do sometimes back before I was on meds, and I felt a familiar itch. The Longform podcast is a series of interviews with writers. That’s the sales pitch, and it’s a good one - let writers ramble about their writing. The hosts ask writers about their process, what inspires them, how a particular project came to be, what their philosophy on journalism or commentary might be, to share stories. The writers oblige, because they have things to plug and because everyone likes to talk about themselves. As I have in the past, I enjoyed the conversations, but again I found the whole thing rather… bloodless.

I felt the same way that I used to when I listened to the show in the past: I liked it, but badly wanted a little more edge. Some harder questions. Some antagonism. Some more pushback. More critical engagement, more criticism of the industry, and especially more consideration of the pathologies of writing culture. Now, being insufficiently critical is hardly a rare failing in a podcast; along with “forced jocularity” and “unearned superiority,” a lack of critical stakes is one of the most common problems with the medium. But I always wanted more from Longform because, well, because I’m me - because I see the industry as so deeply broken, because I see the social culture as so deeply toxic, and because I see the former as a consequence of the latter. I wanted the hosts to draw out guests a little more, not to let them luxuriate in the idealized space of their own self-conception as professionals but to be the same people they are on their Twitter feeds, bitchy and cantankerous. If nothing else, writers are notoriously catty with each other; surely the hosts would be aware that they would be interviewing someone who had an antagonistic relationship with someone they had interviewed in the recent past. Couldn’t you ask “so hey you were shit-talking so-and-so a week ago, tell me about that”? That sort of thing never came up.

Because the Longform podcast was a space where writers came and by necessity engaged with their craft as craft - something that many writers hate to do, for fear of appearing precious or conceited - I wanted it to be a space where the relative irrelevance of craft in the profession was discussed. Because the Longform podcast was a space where writers got (a certain version of) real about the industry, I wanted it to be a space where writers got really real about the industry. Because the Longform podcast was a space where the intersection of the art and commerce of writing was reflected on, I wanted it to reflect the fact that the commerce element had precious little to do with the art. Because the Longform podcast was about writing, I wanted it to be a space about what writing really was, as a social phenomenon, and because I’m me, I wanted the perspective to be like mine - caustic and jaded about that whole world, the social phenomena that surround the craft, a craft that was and is the only thing that’s ever really mattered to me. And because the show was not caustic and jaded, but rather friendly and jocular and light, I felt that it was an example of the petty corruption I saw everywhere in the industry. So I felt it was a bad show and that the hosts were bad hosts for failing to do the basic duty implied by its premise.

But things are a little different, now. I’m no longer able to be so pure. I still get mad at everything, particularly at the social and professional worlds of writing, which seem only to get worse as I get older. The trouble is that I’ve gotten nowhere by asking, all these years, why there is no ombudsman - why there’s no authority out there that looks at all the petty corruption and ugly patronage and fake friendships and social capture and all the rest and, at the least, calls it by its right names. I’ve been flailing around for 15 years looking in various places for people who could at least commiserate about the state of things and identify the failings I saw everywhere. What I couldn’t see (what I allowed myself not to see) was that people had to live within the systems that I wanted them to critique. They had to maintain careers in the profession I wanted them to disavow. And that’s difficult to do. For example, the Longform show has to be the show it is. That means it has to get writers to want to come on. And for writers to want to come on, they have to trust that they won’t have to talk about what they don’t want to talk about. Precisely because I’m right, and grubby social concerns are so professionally important in the industry, insisting on addressing them could result in the show’s roster of potential guests shrinking considerably. Nor did the show’s hosts or creators, who seem to want it to be a laidback and gentle enterprise, ever consent to engaging in the critical project I had imagined.

Could a podcast exist in which writers were willing to get sufficiently real that they’d reflect on the fact that, for example, who you’re friends with in the industry is more important for your professional success than how good you actually are at the craft itself? Maybe it could. But the incentives are all wrong, and ultimately I’m asking for something that I myself have said to be impossible, which is for people to audit themselves. And at some point you have to grow out of righteous anger; it’s the worst kind of anger, the most destructive, the least subject to reform or review.

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Now I’m gonna tell a story I’ve told before, and you can groan or roll your eyes or skip ahead as you like.

In 2015, the New York Times announced the David Carr Fellowship. Carr, a famously pugnacious and old-school reporter, had recently died. The fellowship was sold as a way to bring a different kind of voice to the Times, an outsider voice. Carr was an outsider, or so they said, and they wanted to recruit outsiders in kind, to write for the paper for a couple years. That premise seemed strange to me; Carr was a very singular individual, cantankerous in a great way, but he was no outsider. (In many ways he was a consummate insider.) But, fair enough. They put out the call, people applied, and they announced three winners. To my considerable confusion, they selected three people who were already well-established professionals with staff writer positions at high-profile publications. I had expected kids straight out of college, people whose credits included only their school’s newspapers, their personal blogs, maybe niche unpaid culture sites. In fairness, the contest’s directions called only for applicants “still fairly early in his or her career,” but the selections still seemed completely out of character with what the paper had been saying about the fellowship. Most absurd of all, all three of those selected already enjoyed bylines at The New York Times, prior to applying! It was like giving a fellowship at Goldman Sachs only to people who have already worked the trading floor; what on earth was the point?

The fellowship had been ballyhooed, and the basic rationale of the thing had been violated in a way that seemed farcical to me. So I complained about it, and if you’ve followed my media criticism for a long time you can imagine what happened next. On Twitter, people responded with anger and joking derision towards my complaints. Predictably, some insisted I was just jealous because I hadn’t won the fellowship myself, but I hadn’t applied, as I already had a long list of freelancing credits at major places and simply assumed I was too established to be eligible. There was a lot of the typical “I’m not mad” stuff, the usual empty social media memetic derision that takes up so much space.

Most frustrating for me, my complaints were (of course) immediately dismissed as grinding a personal axe - I just had it out for the winners. But this simply wasn’t true. I had affection for one of the people who had been awarded a fellowship and pleasant indifference towards the other two. The whole point was structural and institutional: I was not criticizing the awardees at all, but rather the Times and the industry it exemplified, an industry where networking and patronage ruled and where a set of insiders looked out for each other at every turn, to the exclusion of those outside the system. But so long as my criticisms could be disregarded as personal gripes, they could be dismissed in total - which in and of itself is an expression of my exact problem with media! The personal eats the structural, always; the insistence on personal origins of professional complaints becomes self-fulfilling. That too has endured, the reflexive refrain from media insiders that complaints about the structural insiderism and institutional deference to personal relationships can only be a matter of personal animus. You might understand why I have spent so much time, casting about for that divine ombudsman in the sky; it’s not just that the media system is filled with so much petty corruption, but that the field has developed such a powerful immune system for denying any external criticism. “You’re just jealous” is all I’ve heard for fifteen years.

The responses to my complaints that actually landed, for me, were different. The first was simply to point out that, from the vantage point of the vaunted New York Times, those established writers probably did look like small fries, worthy of a (vaguely condescending) hand up. More sinister, several suggested to me that the whole fellowship was a pretext to get a few staff writers onboard without offering them long-term contracts, at a time when they were not yet enjoying the boom in digital subscriptions and were presumably under tangibly dicier financial straits than they are now. And that too seems like a plausible explanation to me. Either way, the point was that the scenario seemed to exemplify many of the most absurd pathologies of an absurd and pathological industry - and that many other people in the industry knew it. Because there’s always the backchannel, and even with my small and inconsistent network within the industry, I was hearing complaints about the whole charade - they’re too old, they’re too established, what was the point? But nobody would say anything, publicly. Nobody but me.

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There are always other controversies, big and small, and again and again for a decade and a half I’ve howled at the moon about it all. To pick an example, the whole affair with Jia Tolentino’s parents…. I don’t know, two things were always totally obvious to me about that situation: one, that regardless of the truth, she herself had nothing to apologize for, and two, that the immense outpouring of support for her from her professional peers was gross and untoward. Gross and untoward, that is, to make it seem as though she herself was the victim in a story about human slaves. And the fact that Tolentino may be the single most popular person in media had everything to do with that response. The galactic insincerity, the trembling, portentous expressions of sympathy…. (Libertarian Jonathan Blanks’s overwrought little epideictic is exactly the kind of look-at-me piety I’m talking about.) Nothing had happened to Tolentino. Her status as the coolest girl at Media High had not only not been challenged, it had been cemented. Her book had gone to auction; she could write about whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, and she enjoyed the kind of career many writers long for, the kind where you have more media hits than bylines. And yet the whole industry ached for her. The tragicomedy of the whole thing overwhelmed me, as did the knowledge that it had to be that way, that the minute Tolentino positioned herself as the victim of a smear campaign, there was no possible outcome other than her enjoying weeks in the Twitter limelight.

The media world is one in which Jia Tolentino’s Q rating can be improved by exposure to a scandal that should have expanded people’s consciousness about an arrangement, far too common, that can most charitably be described as a kind of modern indentured servitude. Surely many other writers felt then as I feel now. But they knew better than to say so. There lay only downside.

And there’s always complaints about the substance of pieces that come out. Like this widely-praised piece on Thoreau and Walden by Kathryn Schulz from the New Yorker, which is based almost entirely on the most undergraduate possible mistake to make about Walden, that it’s about “getting back to nature” or similar. It’s not - it’s explicitly not. The fact that Walden Pond is so close to Boston, and that Thoreau wasn’t raising his own cattle for milk or whatever, is not the gotcha that some people think it is, because Walden is not really about nature at all but rather about living intentionally. To mistake the book for a paean to nature, and then complain that the book is “more revered than read,” combines lazy reading with writerly pomposity of truly rarefied air. Schulz writes

The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling. It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places.

Again, Thoreau as John Muir is a reading of the man and the book that cannot survive scrutiny; the natural elements Thoreau champions are surely valued, but valued in large part because absent the influence of other people enables the intentional living that was Thoreau’s real target. And that project calls into question Schulz’s critique. Certainly, living intentionally can appear to be solipsistic, but if so that’s a failing of a great mass of the American philosophical corpus. If Thoreau went to Walden Pond to be alone, he likely did so not because of self-obsession but simply to take the American intellectual project to its natural endpoints. I would argue that doing so is hardly an abdication of responsibility to other people but rather a means to complete that project without hindering other people and being hindered in kind.

And this came from the same writer who, earlier that year, had gone mega-viral with a piece that, I felt, misled readers about the nature of a recurrence interval for seismic events. I don’t exaggerate: that piece enjoyed its immense audience in large measure because Schulz had walked her readership directly into the Gambler’s Fallacy, knowingly or not. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for doing so! And here she was, shitting on Thoreau with a tendentious reading of his book… for what? For who? Schulz is a prodigious researcher with enviable prose chops, which makes it all more frustrating when her worst work is rewarded. But she merely operates in a broader milieu where the difference between artistic regard and personal friendship has been systematically dismantled. Again and again, this industry rewards laziness, self-obsession, insincere friendship, and naked professional ambition. And though it’s an industry filled with people who talk shit from the safety of Slack, it’s also one where no one risks ruffling the wrong feathers. That’s how you lose work.

Here’s the nub of it all: I am the one who always tells liberals to drop their childish attachment to appeals to abstract justice. When Trump was elected and Democrats were daily insisting “this is not normal!” I chortled; who cares what’s normal? Trump just was. When liberals and leftists raged for days that Black people would be killed for doing what MAGA rioters did on 1/6, I rolled my eyes; who was the benevolent overseer that could hear their appeals? Who were they talking to? When people wrestle endlessly over what constitutes facism, I have always clucked my tongue, as if there’s some great dictionary in the sky that we could consult to find out, and as if that dusty old book somehow had the power to make change itself. And I still feel this way, more or less - that people on the left are obsessive about making appeals to the universe to restore some sort of justice or order, when the universe could not be less indifferent. Politics is about power. You learn to push its levers or you lose. Appealing to the intangible does nothing but makes you feel good, and even that only fleetingly.

But haven’t I done the same, for 15 years? Haven’t I cried out to the dusk, asking for some vengeful spirit to look at the profession that exists and its distance from the one I’ve imagined, and set things right? I’m afraid I have.

I have somehow become a professional success. This newsletter, obviously, has enabled me to make writing my only job and to enjoy an upper-middle-class existence in doing so. I’ve signed my second big-money book contract with a major publisher, and at this point there are few stamps I still care to collect when it comes to freelancing. So whatever this plaint may be, it isn’t the bitterness of someone who has failed professionally. It’s the bitterness of someone who has yet to fully come to understand that sometimes Chinatown can only be Chinatown. I don’t, actually, think that writing is a profession full of scoundrels; there’s plenty of those, but most writers in the industry are thoughtful and perceptive people who care about their work and want to pursue it with integrity. They’re just also afraid, afraid about the ever-shrinking number of chairs in a field where financial security is hard to come by. And they’re ambitious, in a context where one’s ambitions are always constrained by one’s popularity. And they’re eager to be liked, and even I’m not cynical enough to judge them too harshly for that.

The truth is that whatever else was true, Tolentino was defending her family and protecting a career that was built out of immense personal talent and considerable hard work. Schulz was a writer under a deadline working according to the dictates of a professional world where spectacle is increasingly a mandated element of written work. The Longform podcast guys are just people trying to make a friendly show about writing with people they’d like to remain free to get a beer with afterwards. Even the people in charge at the New York Times probably just felt like they were hiring three cool writers, and the whole pretense of the fellowship was just more of their usual self-obsessed pomposity. Perhaps the deeper, and sadder, reality is that most everything that looks like corruption to me has been the result of people trying their best. Which does not mean that there isn’t any corruption, only that there’s nothing to be done. Perhaps the majestic injustice of the world, the immorality that orbits all around us, does not arrange itself conveniently into discrete deficits of integrity. And perhaps I’m simply someone whose anger has gotten him little and cost him a lot, but who still cannot quite help himself.

I have tried to turn this business’s eyes back on itself since I was in my late twenties. No use - for reasons that are not related to this argument but that are my fault, I am no more trusted by the profession than I trust it myself. No use - the entire culture is bent on not seeing that personal regard from and for other writers is just another kind of coin, passed between grubby fingers as people pursue their professional best interest. No use - because I lack the moral standing to complain. So I still look to the sky for some just, interventionist god of integrity, and all of these essays are rituals in my own private cargo cult, empty gestures, a sad old dog howling to the moon.