The Jerk Store called, and other high-value thoughts

Gladwellian payback, double secret probationary burns, my first paid subscriber, and more!

Apr 18, 2023

As of today I have one paid subscriber, my friend and colleague (and venerable patron of the arts) Matt Bucher, an eminent American in his own right who is, among many other things, a scholar of David Foster Wallace.

Matt’s generous support has advanced me 1/5th of the way toward my goal of raising $300 to pay a freelancer to help me produce another podcast episode (I have one in the can that will go out soon). Five more subscribers and it’s a go for ep. 2! Join the stampede!

THE JERK STORE CALLED

The latest episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, is a fascinating exercise in revenge disguised as humility. Gladwell and his partner Michelle Goldberg got shellacked in a public debate with Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murrary. Rather than nurse his wounds in private he produced a podcast in which he engaged the assistance of various master debaters to analyze his rhetorical failures. The ostensible approach, then, was humility. He got beaten. He wasn’t blaming anyone but himself. He was delving into what he did wrong and confronting the characters flaws his mistakes may have revealed. By the end he would better understand himself and maybe even grow a bit.

The real motive, it became clear, was twofold. He wanted to avenge his loss to Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray, and in particular to strike back at Murray, whom he clearly loathes. And he wanted to do the thing where you actually get to deliver the withering comeback that you failed to deliver in the moment (a la George Costanza vis a vis shrimp and jerk stores). Because it's Gladwell, who even at his worst has a better sense of story and pacing than almost anyone else, it’s a good episode. It doesn't feel, mostly, like an exercise in hostility. But listen and tell me there’s not a lot of barely submerged aggression.

SICK BURN

Blake Smith, who I wrote about last week, has a characteristically smart essay at Tablet about the trans writer Andrea Long Chu. It is not what one might call a charitable take on Chu. There are many sick burns in the piece, but my favorite is this quadruple secret ricochet burn in which over the course of a few sentences he insults not just Chu but the late Lauren Berlant, N+1, the New Yorker, and possibly Agnes Callard and Martha Nussbaum as well. Smith writes:

"[Chu's] intensely singular vision could appear plausible to readers at prestigious publications, however, in part because it built on the work of Lauren Berlant, the recently deceased professor at the University of Chicago. ... Berlant is a favorite of the N+1 set and has been profiled in The New Yorker (which has also graced our national consciousness with in-depth profiles of the deeply consequential activities of some of her Chicago colleagues, from Agnes Callard’s promiscuity to Martha Nussbaum’s Botox injections). Her most notable idea—if it can be qualified as one—is the titular concept of her 2011 book Cruel Optimism, which points to the fact that people want things that are, in fact, bad for them. Cruel Optimism puts breathtakingly obvious observations about human nature in the abstract, perplexed, ungainly prose that strikes some graduate students and writers for The New Yorker, it seems, as the mark of Big Think."

Now that's the kind of intellectual shanking I came to the prison yard for. That "if it can be qualified as one" is just such a sweet kiss of contempt. 😘

REVERSE DOUBLE MAILBAG

Until or unless I have enough readers to justify a "mailbag" post, I'm flipping the classroom and just throwing my own questions into the ether for whatever readers are interested in answering them. So here's my question for the week:

Last week I wrote about "the asshole" in contemporary journalism, citing Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald as two examples of the type. Are there others out there working the scene right now? Right answers only.

KINDA SICK BURN, MAYBE?

Toward the end of his Liberties essay on Sheila Heti, Jon Baskin says, in a rather indirect way, what most of us know to be true but haven’t been publicly willing to say, which is that a great deal of what's being praised right now, in the literary world, is being assessed far more for the political/racial/gender identities of its authors than for its merit as literature. He writes:

"Yet the role of the critic in the artist’s own time is still significant. It can prepare the way in the broader public for the cultivation of the values and the virtues that are internal to art as a distinctive practice and a meaningful human activity, or it can discourage them. ... The lesson is worth keeping in mind as we struggle to emerge from a period in which our book reviewers, literary prize committees, and publishing houses have too often, rather than showing what it means to make judgments informed by aesthetic criteria, merely reiterated and amplified public sentiments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the internal values of art.

I don’t imagine that Baskin has any illusions that praise and awards in the literary world have ever been free of politics, nor that whole groups of people weren't excluded from consideration and recognition for centuries. What I take him to be saying, though, is that if the discourse around art becomes too disconnected from the value systems and criteria that are distinctive to art, then it can’t help but devalue the activity of art-making relative to competing systems of value. Do we care about literature or do we care about equity? And if the latter is the case, for too long, it has to erode not just the status of literature in our society but our capacity, as a literary intellectual community, to talk to each other in meaningful ways, because we won’t really speaking the language we say we’re speaking. At some point (and I'd wager we're past that point) the cost outweighs the gain.

Happy to be disagreed with on this point, but I do feel pretty confident that we should stop pretending that what's clearly happening isn't happening.