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Foreign.
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Hello, welcome to Blocked and Reported. I'm Jesse Singel. Katie Herzog is off this week getting moose reupholstered. So I am joined instead by Pamela Paul. Pamela Paul is a writer at large at the Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she was a columnist at the New York Times. Prior to that, she edited their book section. And prior to that, she did a lot of other stuff. Pamela, hello.
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A
Hello.
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I'm embarrassed to even ask you this, given my own status. How many books have you written?
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A
Oh, I have written 10. One of them has not come out yet. It comes out in the fall.
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B
What's that one called?
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A
Well, it's called the Path and it's a picture book for children. It's my third picture book for children. Not only a very fun thing to do, but also has the advantage of being about 500 words versus 100,000 words, so a little bit easier.
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B
Among others, we also got 100 things we've lost, Internet, how to Raise a Reader, the Starter Marriage and the Future Matrimony Rectangle Time. I wouldn't even. I can't even read them all. There's just too many of them.
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A
They also have very long titles. They have extremely annoying.
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B
I didn't want to say this publicly, but they're just. You got to shorten those titles. Pamela, come on.
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I know. It's the subtitles. It's the subtitles. I don't know them myself.
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Very pleased to have you on Blocked and Reported. Pamela, there's a lot I want to discuss with you, including a national award nominated magazine article that is about you and your perfidy. Perfidiousness.
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A
Yes.
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B
I feel like that word's not thrown around enough. Are you. Do you consider yourself perfidious?
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A
Well, I think that people have a hard time pronouncing the shorter version. Perfidy. Perfidy.
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B
Perfidy.
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A
Perfidy. It doesn't. It doesn't sound evil enough.
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Pronunciation is not a strong suit of this podcast. I also want to discuss the present state of the website Lit Hub and the broader online literary community. There's also a really interesting article you wrote about therapy being increasingly woman dominated. And then at the end, in a section reserved for our premium, premium subscribers, we're going to answer some of their questions. But before we get to all that, it's been, what, almost a year? How are you liking your life as a writer at large at the Wall Street Journal?
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A
Oh, I love it. I love it. It's. It has not been quite a year, so I. My last official day at The New York Times was May 2nd. My first official day at the Wall street journal was May 5th. So I technically had a weekend off in between. And I love it. It's a very different job from my previous one. I was in Opinion. Now I'm in the newsroom at the WA. I was at the New York Times for 14 years. So know the ins and outs of that newsroom very well. And before that had been at Time and the Economist. So I've never worked for the Wall Street Journal. It is its own unique culture. And so far I am extremely impressed and happy to be here.
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B
My last real job, and probably my last real job ever is I was. I was technically a writer at large at New York Magazine, writing mostly for their website. And I do rem. I mean, I now have certain differences of opinion with the direction that magazine's taken, but it was an incredible job, just in the sense of waking up every day not always knowing what story I would be working on by the end of the day or what story kind of story I'd be working on next week. And in your writing, there's like this sort of great expanse of different subjects. And I'm guessing that that's pretty exciting and liberating.
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A
It is. I actually have a lot more freedom to write about what I want to write here at the Wall Street Journal than I did at the New York Times. As an opinion col. That feels very freeing. I also really like the title At Large. I don't know how you felt about it, but it's both sort of weirdly menacing, like you're out there and no one's caught you. And also has this aura of like you don't have to really be anywhere, which is not true. I actually am in the office three days a week. But yeah, I like the sort of the double sided nature of that title.
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B
It does seem like a fugitive situation where you are a writer at large. You're a writer for now, until they can apprehend you, at which point you won't be a writer anymore.
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A
That's exactly right, yes. No, I think I'm the first person with that title at the Journal. And basically what it means in practice is that I'm not a beat reporter. I am not writing about commodities or energy markets for which I would be very ill equipped. I can write pretty much about things that I'm most interested in, largely feature writing, sometimes slightly investigative in nature, but the kind of issues that I've written about, you know, at the Times and then earlier on for. Well, for the New York Times Magazine, for the Atlantic, for other places.
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B
One thing I'm fascinated by because it comes up on the show a lot is so you're on the news side. And I'm also fascinated by this because I wish, I wish there were rules governing my own social media behavior. I wish I wasn't allowed to X or skeet or whatever we're calling it as much. But you're in that like old school bucket of like they actually. And I think this is good in many ways, but there's some restrictions on what you can sort of say publicly and what you can tweet and stuff. Right?
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A
Well, so my restrictions are totally self imposed. I actually don't know what the Wall street journals are in terms of their social media. I do think that there are reporters who have social media presences of various stripes. But before I moved from the Book Review to Opinion, I actually, this is like going back in, you know, several iterations of, you know, the world's relationship to Twitter, slash X. I asked if it would be okay if I did not if I went off of Twitter before taking that job. So yeah, so when I, when I presented myself to Opinion, I was at the Book Review, as you said. I was the editor there and running the books desk. And I wanted to be a columnist for assorted reasons. And I had a few requests. One of them was I want to be off social media. I don't want to have to do that. And is that okay? Because it proves predated a later iteration of the Times where people were sort of gently. It was gently suggested that maybe being on X wasn't a good idea. And that I think even was before.
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B
Why might that happen?
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I know, I know some people have gotten into trouble in that landscape. But I had another request which was to have an editor. Because in earlier iterations of the New York Times, opinion columnists did not have editors. And having been an editor, I believe in editors. I think they're very useful people who serve. And so I wanted an editor. And then the last thing I wanted was to be able to write only once a week because again, in the olden days in opinion, colonists often were signed up for two times a week cadence. And as it turned out, all of those things were already in motion for the desk as a whole as it was evolving in the sort of post James Bennett era. So I got all my wishes and I've stayed off of Twitter. I recently joined Rejoined cause I disconnected my Twitter, my Facebook, my LinkedIn, even. The only thing I kept was my instagram which is there primarily to showcase my cats and what I'm reading and what theater I'm seeing just to show I'm a human being and occasionally travel, which is a very fraught area for me, which we probably don't need to go into. But I originally.
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B
Wait, wait, wait, sorry. Fraught?
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A
Why is it fraught? You know, originally when I went on Instagram, I found it very upsetting because people were taking vacations that always felt like better vacations than the ones I was taking. So I just had terrible fomo. I just. Even if I was on vacation, like, if I was on vacation and you'd
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B
be looking at a better vacation.
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A
I was looking at a better vacation.
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B
Two beaches. Two beaches over. There's a more beautiful person with a more beautiful sunset.
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A
Right. And even if I were at the beach, then I'd be looking at cities, you know, and seeing people like in Dubrovnik or, you know, they were just in more exciting places. So it always made me unhappy. I actually, I don't know if this means that I'm sort of better. Better adjust. I actually now really enjoy seeing other people's travel photos. Like, I find it very therapeutic and sort of escape. Y. One of the editors.
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B
You are such a better person than I am.
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A
No. One of the editors at the Wall Street Journal is on safari in South Africa right now and I'm just like completely Harding every single photo he puts up. But in any case, I did recently go back onto LinkedIn because it is useful working for newspaper that has a large business function. Many people are on LinkedIn and so it's a useful tool to. For sources.
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B
I'm having my. I'm getting smacked in the face by human nature because I'm in the East Bay in California. I'm like halfway through a three month stint here and I'll have these moments of. And like, I don't want to. I don't want to brag or sound like a jerk. It is, it's very beautiful. I mean, you've. You were here recently. You were. I didn't see you, but you were in San Francisco.
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I was here recently and I. Did you not have the feeling of like, why aren't we all here? Like, what are we doing back here in New York?
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Yes, but then at least if you're a neurotic Jew, I'll have these flashes of like, you know, there's something so special about stepping on newly refrozen dog pee covered snow on Flatbush Avenue in March, and I'll want that in my Brain, which is just kind of sick, actually. Right. Like there's.
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Yeah, no, that's a. You've got a strong masochistic streak going there.
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B
I really do. Okay, well, look, I want to. We're going to get into some. I don't want to call it culture war stuff because I think it's important. It is culture war stuff. We're going to get to that. I want to start with this article you had recently titled, what Will Happen when All the Male Therapists are gone. Psychology. This is a subhead. Psychology is increasingly a female dominated profession that may have implications for boys and men. So you start this article by quoting Marty Seligman, who's this titanic figure. Basically one of the founders of positive psychology. He pointed out that back when he started, psychology was 80% men. And the subjects chosen to research seem to be influenced by that. Quote, from the 1960s through the 1980s, it was aggression, conflict and trauma, but not love, meaning friendship or cooperation. Things have flipped significantly. You write, quote, in the U.S. men now account for only 18% of social workers and 20% of psychologists, down from 38% and 68% in 1968, respectively, according to the American Institute of Boys and Men. Not to be confused with Boys to men, a excellent 90s group. But first question, so why should we care? What are the possible implications of this field going from being mostly male to mostly female?
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Okay, so let me throw in a few fun facts and to be sure before we start. So, fun fact, Martin Seligman was the mentor to Jonathan Haidt, who is everywhere and about talking about.
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B
She is everywhere.
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Yes.
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He's besmirching the good names of cell phones in 15 year olds pockets.
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A
Right, right. Not very optimistic, but yeah. Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology. So a sort of, you know, rare happy field in the landscape of mental health. And so the question I wanted to ask was we've been hearing all about this crisis of boys and men and. And then the conversation sort of goes nowhere. It's sort of like, wow, that really sucks. Or some people will say like, well, they had it coming, you know, that like the world was good for men for a long time and now it's terrible. Or it says, yeah, and it's getting worse because, you know, the manosphere, slash, you know, male loneliness epidemic slash toxic masculinity. So I thought, let's see, like, what are we doing to address this? So I was looking at that on the one hand and then on the other hand, the fact that this field has become so Female dominated. And that was something that I first started thinking about when I was at the New York Times. I wrote an investigation into the School of Social Work at Columbia University. And I was working on that project when October 7th happened. And so the piece that eventually ran sort of took off the protests that were happening specifically at the School of Social Work and experience among social workers there after the hamas attacks on October 7 and the subsequent protests, and then kind of backed into this larger problem with its School of Social Work. But that larger problem, one of the ways I became aware of it, was a couple of sort of whistleblowers who happen to have been female social workers and, you know, who graduated from the school long ago, alerted me to the fact that the school and its teachings had kind of gone off the rails. And some of the sources for that story were men. And in my interview.
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B
Well, so just gone off the rails in what sense?
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Oh, in the ways that all academic institutions have gone off the rails. Like essentially a bar pot episode. Exactly, exactly. Insert bars pod episode here. So I don't think we have to get into that. But suffice to say, when I was speaking to some of the men who were students at the School of Social Work, what they were saying is like they were essentially in their classes being told that they were the problem. And I think that I thought that was really interesting.
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B
That stuck with me like that they, as part of the class of men,
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yes, they were the patriarchy, they were the oppressor, they were inherently bad. And they sort of had to assume. Assume an apologetic stance sort of from the get go. And you know, that's always sort of a bad feeling when you're starting out at lunch. Starting out at lunch. Sorry, that's my. My food brain speaking.
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B
It is lunchtime where you are.
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A
Yes, it is. But if you're starting off in life to hear that, you know, you're a problem and, and that's always interested me, that whole phenomenon of like high school boys and junior and, well, middle school kids, like essentially boys being told like, you've had your time to speak and now be quiet. And, you know, another sort of main backdrop to the story is that I find that the media, media stories and cultural stories around the sexes tend to see it as a zero sum game, which I just, yeah, I find ludicrous and so unhelpful, so counterproductive, because it's not as if, you know, women, feminist or not, don't have men in their lives. And if you have half the world extremely unhappy, very angry, very Stifled or stymied in their life choices. That is not good for women either. Never mind the fact that it is bad for men. And so anytime I'm writing about, you know, a story, whether it's focused on men or on women, I'm always cognizant of the fact that, like, this is. There are not teams here. We are all on this planet together. And any narrative that is like, believe women or men are inherently oppressors, I find to be really simplistic and something to kind of work against as a journalist. So what I wanted to do with this story is to take this phenomenon of, of a profession that has become female dominated and this client population, or, you know, customer population, patient population that is going through some kind of crisis and figure out, like, what is the relationship between these two. And I, you know, I went in not, not, not really knowing, but I was interested in finding out, like, what is the implication for, I don't know, men who think, maybe I want to go into the mental health professions? Like, is that a welcoming place for me? This is a tough labor market. There is a health professionals, general people in the caring fields. And this is something that Richard Reeves of the aforementioned American Academy of Boys and Men that you mentioned. And then I talk about in the story like, that he's talked about a lot that, like, this is a labor opportunity for men. So is it a welcoming one? Is it a place where there's a need specifically for men? And then also, and I didn't know the answer to this, you know, is there a need? Like, do men sometimes specifically need a male therapist? And as it turns out, in large part because not only has the clinical field of mental health become female dominated, but the research parts of it, most of the research parts, there are a couple of exceptions that are a little bit more male dominated or male friendly, But a lot of the research is now, like, the social psychologist is very female dominated. So they're not even really looking into this question of what's going on with men. So there's very little research on this on, like, do men sometimes need to be seen by men? Or is there. Can that be part of what is called the therapeutic alliance, which is basically like the match between the clinician and the patient?
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B
It seems like part of the problem here is in these fields, psychology, social work, others, the infusion of like, a very particular kind of politics might not always be compatible with seeing the person sitting across from you in the room as just like an individual human being in their own right, with their own context.
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A
Yes, yes, that's definitely a part of the problem. And you know, one of the things I wrote about with that school of social work at Columbia is that, you know, social work has always had a very strong social justice component. But as alluded to earlier, like, that's taken on a very, very strong sort of overtone or dominant sort of messaging in the field. And so, you know, there were a lot of stories. I mean, first there was a wave after 2020, which is interesting and frankly kind of backs up what I talk about in this story, which is that men sometimes want to see other men. But in 2020, there was this, you know, discussion around, like, do black people sometimes want to talk to another black therapist? And what's interesting is like, at that time there was a lot of, you know, sort of credence given to that idea. But if you talk about it just in terms of sex and not race, that sort of, that sense of urgency kind of falls away. And what I found in this, you know, in the, in the story is one, as I said, there's not a lot of research, but most people don't care if they see a man or a woman. And most the little research that's done out there also shows that the race doesn't necessarily matter. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes you have someone who, let's say, is dealing with an issue that is about identity or sexuality or about things that are considered. And here, you know, throw in all the caveats. Not all men, et cetera, et cetera, but things like alcohol, like substance abuse disorders are more common among men. Dealing with aggression, hostility, pornography use, questions over sexual, you know, suicide or suicide, suicidal ideation. Like questions around hostility, like those are more common to men. And sometimes for some men, they do want to talk to someone who is another man, especially if they fear that they're going to be judged in some way.
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B
Yeah, it's what's interesting. There's some research suggesting that. And I've like, I've become a little bit black pilled about research in general just for my own writing. I don't, I don't trust it. But I think some people never trust research.
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A
No, never trust research.
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B
The only true thing is religion, as I'm sure you and I agree. There's some research suggesting that you have all these different modalities, these different styles of therapy. There's some research caveat, caveat, caveat, suggesting that all that really matters, or what matters more than anything is just your relationship with your therapist. Just having someone, you feel like you can trust and you can open up to. There's some research suggesting that matters a lot more than their particular style of therapy. And as someone who I'm in therapy and that just completely intuitively matches my experience, for what it's worth, because there's such a difference between sitting across from someone you feel like you can talk to openly versus someone you feel a little bit at a distance from or sealed off from.
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A
Yeah, no, I mean, that is true. And the one study that I found that looked into the sex of the therapist and asked men specifically, like, do you care? And if so, what do you Prefer? Found that 60% of men don't care. And of the remaining 40%, 20% wanted to talk to a woman and 20% preferred to talk to a man. So just in terms of the numbers, it's a minority, but it's a sizable minority. And if you have very few male practitioners, then that's going to be. It's going to be harder to find someone, never mind like someone who lives nearby, who maybe, you know, has the right hours, who accepts your insurance, et cetera. So it is a kind of supply and demand issue. And then one of the interesting things that didn't make it into the story is that I did speak to one Orthodox Jewish therapist, and he said that in Orthodox Judaism at least, you really are supposed to see someone of the same sex. And in a pluralistic society like our own, it's hard to imagine that there aren't other, like, religious groups, cultural immigration groups, where that also is a kind of cultural norm and a preference for some people. So you kind of need men in this profession. And again, even though I said from the get go, this isn't a zero sum game, I just want to insert another big caveat, which is that when you look at those percentages like we talked about, you know, 18% of social workers are female. It should be noted that you said 18% are male. Sorry, are male. It should be noted that a lot of this we talked about 68, of course, the women's movement, huge labor force, influx of women. And so some of this is just a natural outgrowth of those larger sort of social and economic shifts in the labor force. But there is also data that shows that there's a certain tipping point in any field. And the most obvious parallel is education, where something becomes so female dominated that then men no longer want to be in it. And also, not unrelatedly, the prestige and the pay tends to drop off when an occupation becomes largely female.
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B
Reading your article, I couldn't help but think of the recent controversy over Helen Andrews and this sort of great feminization theory. And I should note I was a bit skeptical of some of the specifics. I am. I've written about that in my newsletter. But I'm curious what you think about that and how that fits into everything you're talking about.
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I think everything. You think, Jesse, on that? No, I mean, that's always a safe bet. I think that there were elements of truth. You know, it's like, as with all of these, I don't know, I'm not a big fan of, like, grand overarching thesis pieces like that because they always tend to oversimplify. And I thought that one did. And I also, that she overreached in terms of her conclusions. And there are just so many exceptions that it's hard to. It's hard to fully buy in that said, I think that, you know, both men and women can agree that it is generally not a good thing when an occupation becomes dominated entirely by one sex. Now, also with exceptions, because, you know, there are some occupations that women just generally aren't drawn to. Doesn't mean they can't, if they want be you know, in, I don't know, garbage college or. Or what is it called? Sanitation removal. No, what is it called? What's the official name? I can't.
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B
Garbage man.
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A
Garbage man. Thank you.
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B
You're such a woman. You don't know the garbage. What a garbage man is?
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A
I don't know what a garbage.
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B
Every little boy for a little.
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A
I don't care to touch.
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B
But before we become aware of certain, like, socioeconomic differences, stereotypes, I would say every little boy has a period of wanting to be a garbage man because you get to ride around on a big TR truck. But I guess as a woman, you never experienced that.
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A
No, I never went through that phase. No, I skipped that part. But so with Helen Andrews. Yeah. I also, I don't feel like. I don't know. There are certain traits of women managers in my limited data set of one experience that really don't align with things that she talked about. So again, I kind of go back to, like, believe all women, which is another, you know, grand sweeping statement where my instinct is to say, really, why would you believe all women. Women are such good liars? Like, you know, not to say like again.
- [25:21]
B
So this is a direct quote, Pamela Paul. All women are liars is what you're saying.
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A
No, no, they're very good at it. I mean, I frankly, I think women are often much better liars than Our men there are sometimes less confident liars, less brazen, but I think very clever in their. In their execution.
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B
There's like, that. There's like the Donald Trump is sort of the platonic ideal of the male liar who doesn't even care about being convincing and can just get through on brazenness. I think you're pointing to a different, more emotionally sophisticated type of dissembling.
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A
Exactly, exactly. They're more subtle. We're more subtle.
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B
Interesting.
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A
Okay, well, I'm a terrible liar, so I'm also an exception to that. Like a minute I lie, I immediately confess because I already feel like I've been caught out.
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B
Think that I always struggle with this subject, just all this. This sexes stuff, because I think people have trouble acknowledging a few different things are true at the same time. Men obviously long dominated most high prestige areas and in many cases at the sort of managerial level and higher. They continue to. That being said during the same time when like, we've been able to talk about feminism has just become popular and we've been able to talk about it more openly and a lot of feminist ideas have sort of trickled down in the mainstre. This is also a period when by, by many measures of like, early life outcomes just starting out all the way up to, like, early career stuff. Women are in many cases outpacing men. And I feel like people have trouble holding those two truths together at the same time.
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A
Yes, yes. I mean, you're right. The whole Jacob Savage, you know, argument, I felt like was. Had a lot of truth to it. It's interesting because if millennial men were screwed, then I sometimes think the parallel to that is that Gen X women were screwed. But that just may be my own demographic bias, being a Gen X female. One of my friends had the, I think said, you know, we got five minutes, which is kind of true before we became Karen.
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B
But you guys are all Karens. I just love calling women Karens.
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's super nice.
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B
Do you think, before you move on, like, do you think this basic idea of, like, difference feminism, which was really out of vogue for a long time, like, the idea of, like, we can. We can have a feminism that acknowledges differences between men and women. Part of me, in part because of, like, frankly, Lindy west discourse, which I don't think we're gonna have time to get into, but it's been fascinating. Katie and I have talked about it. She wants to talk about it more.
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A
Yeah, no, I feel like you've covered like the. You guys have been on that.
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B
I Mean, where this is like Pentagon Papers level of just important breaking news we're doing on the Lindy west story. But I feel like that and other parts of the conversation to me, like there's an opening there for nuance. Yeah, for nuance and for, and just frankly for like an acknowledgment that men and women are different. And that's fine. Which I feel like has been something that people have rejected, at least generally speaking on the left for a long time.
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A
Yeah, no, it's been very out of vogue. I mean, it's interesting. So equality feminism versus difference feminism. For a long time, you know, equality feminism was sort of, you know, you can be what, who you want to be, very free to be you and me. And that was ascendant in the 70s and 80s and that was sort of always my kind of, that's the framework that I grew up with. And then there was difference feminism. And some of equality feminism, I think also rejected some of the greater or sort of more aggressive claims of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, which in its sort of most man dominated forms was like, you know, men, you know, we be hunter gatherers, people who like to spread our seed among many women. And women are the receptacles of those seeds. And so like there's a, you know, I think a lot of women sort of naturally pushed back against that. At the same time, I think that at least among, I don't know, I guess what do we call them? Like normie women, they identify as feminist or not. Like there is an acknowledgement at this point that there, there's a difference. You know, there's a difference, like we can talk about parental leave, but there's a difference between maternity leave and paternity leave in that like one person's body was like, went through, you know, like a, a tornado of change and then is if the parent, you know, if the woman is, is breastfeeding is then like still very much tied to being at home and the, the male in that equation, assuming that it's a heterosexual couple, not a same sex couple who like or like the non birthing female partner, but they don't have to go through that. So there are some biological differences that I think, you know, even as we try to get parity and have equality with many of our policies, like you just can't ignore those basic biological differences. And I think, you know, and we don't have to get in the weeds here, but it comes up a lot when you are differentiating between and the idea of sex differences and then and sort of issues around gender. But we won't go there.
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B
We're definitely not going to talk about gender on this podcast. Well, the last thing I'll say on this is like there's a difference between the ugly face of like online curdled over the top ever psych where it's like sort of a more normative claims about men should dominate things and really overheated claims about vast differences versus like they're. There's just reasonable observations there that on average men and women tend to differ in certain ways. And I think it's like one of those situations where only someone with much too much education could deny that. Just because like you're saying normally people see this just over years of iterated male female interactions. There's some differences there.
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A
And also just to circle back to the article, like if you're, and the premises, if you are upset about the manosphere and you're upset about those kind of, you know, ur manly man kind of narratives about like what men should be and what they should, you know, how they should think and act, then wouldn't you want to have some kind of positive pro social ideal or norms or things that men should aspire to be as men. Like I think Elliot Ackerman has written about this. Sebastian Younger. There's, there's some, you know, Richard Reeves,
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B
I was gonna say Scallaway.
- [32:01]
A
I have not read what's. Yeah, I haven't, I haven't read into what he's done there. But like you know, you can't have a world where you know, you're asking little girls like what do you think makes for you know, a great girl and what's special about being a girl or a woman and not ask the same of boys and not allow them, allow space for them to give an answer that isn't like, you know, people don't turn their noses up at.
- [32:26]
B
Right. I think the problem here and in so many other places is that there's certain groups and not naming names. No, no, no, no. I didn't mean groups in that sense. Although we will get to the groups different. So different groups either are granted a lot of empathy about their problems or they're not granted any empathy at all. So if, if a teenager or a 20 year old boy falls into the manosphere, that's his fault. That's a reflection on his character versus some other person doing bad things that, that you extend them empathy. That's because of their circumstances. There's no sort of, I mean universalism is obviously for now Moribund. But I think it's really important because people are just people. And as you're saying, men are almost half the population and we also get very angry and we cause a disproportionate amount of societal trouble. Everyone should be invested not only in men, but in men. Feeling okay. I think that's more than enough about Pamela. I don't want this podcast to be dominated by us.
- [33:26]
A
People are people. Depeche Mode kind of thing.
- [33:28]
B
Yeah, exactly. Okay, let me quickly do housekeeping and then we're going to get into some of the slightly more culture worry, but interesting stuff. You're listening to Blocked and reported. We are a podcast. You can email us at blocked andreported. Podcastmail. Com. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Is that what it's called these days? I don't know. But yes. Best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at Blocked. And is there anything you want to plug? I mean, you've got a book coming out. You plug that, right?
- [33:59]
A
Yeah, I have a picture book coming out called the Path. It's coming out late August. So if you have a child in your life, it's actually, it's my 2020 book, which is to say I wrote it during the worst days of the kind of pre election COVID lockdown. And I would say it's a very Blocked and reported kind of theme to the book.
- [34:22]
B
It's about sort of in the vein of like Anti Racist Baby.
- [34:25]
A
Yeah, that's exactly right. Y. It's part two. It's for a slightly older reader than the board book version of Anti Racist Baby. No, it's about perspective taking. And so I thought about it as I was walking on this path near where I live. And it was that moment where one time I was biking with my kids and we didn't have masks on and a woman walking in the other direction yelled masks at us. And it was just like, what are you doing? Talking about, you know, the CDC had actually just said, like, guess what? You don't have to wear masks outdoors. But I just thought about this idea that like, you can be on a path and see everyone on the path as like doing it wrong and being in your way. Like, it's kind of like when you're, you know, if you're biking along the Hudson river in the city, you see like the Rollerbladers as being exceptionally annoying because they're slightly erratic and they, they cut a wider swath on the path and so they're your obstacle. And so this book is about, but for very small children, about. You know, you could either see people that way as, like, being obstacles in your core, you know, in the course of your daily life, or you could see them as somehow enhancing your daily life, and it's just all a matter of perspective.
- [35:41]
B
I. That's sort of annoyingly uplifting and cheerful.
- [35:44]
A
I know. I'm sorry to be sweet.
- [35:46]
B
I was hoping you'd write a super dark, messed up children's book, but that'll be next. Yes. Okay. That'll be out in the fall, you said, right?
- [35:52]
A
Yes.
- [35:53]
B
Okay. So are you ready for the. The culture war portion of the proceedings? Pamela?
- [35:58]
A
Yes. Yes.
- [35:59]
B
Are you strapped in?
- [36:00]
A
I'm strapped in.
- [36:01]
B
Okay, so I. Let's. Let's start with this article in Lithub by Sandy Ernest Allen. It's headlined, what Was Lost? A Queer Accounting of the New York Times Book Review 2013-2022. Subhead, 13 Essential Books by Trans and Queer Writers, Reviewed by Trans and Queer Writers. So the basic argument here is that when you headed up the Times book coverage, I guess queer authors were, what, Ignored? Blacklisted? What was the official policy? Let's break some news here.
- [36:32]
A
There was a spreadsheet. There was a spreadsheet. We had black. It was a little bit like the shitty Men, Media Men list, where we were just like, if someone. No, I can't even joke about it because it's just so insane. I mean, I was gonna really go down that. That path, but it's too dark. I mean, it's interesting. I found the whole premise of this article, which someone sent me. It's always fun. Jesse, I don't know how you feel about this. Like, when someone is like, oh, my God, there's this totally crazy, insane thing that someone said about you on Blue Scream. Or like, did you see this insane thing, Blue Scream?
- [37:06]
B
Is that a Freudian slip?
- [37:07]
A
That's my. No, that's my Very Deliberate screen. That's great retitling.
- [37:10]
B
But, like, I get this all the time. People are like, yeah, look at what this crazy person said. I'm like, thank you. Don't send me that. Like, either. If I don't know about it. That's. I mean, if it's like an imminent threat on my life, sure, let me alert me. Or the police. But, like, yeah, no, I prefer. Okay, so that's how you found out about this? Someone sent it to you?
- [37:27]
A
Yeah. I mean, first off, Lithub, you know, began, I think, as a very noble and interesting project way back when. And Morgan Entrekin was One of the founders who's a publisher at Atlantic Grove and some other people who are invested in the literary world who just felt like there needed to be a really good, to kind of convene literary conversation and gather information. And I don't know, it sort of seems to have devolved into a social justice website for the literary adjacent. But it, yeah, like this story, I mean it's, it's like there's some stories that are written on non news websites that it just like you do. You barely had to look at like Wikipedia to have known that what you are writing is like manifestly false. So part of what I enjoyed about this is that there, it has this as its fantasy. You know, the idea that I am like this sort of multi tentacled person in charge of the book review who is determining every book that is reviewed and who should review it. Which is first of all like I don't, I, I, I don't even, I don't have the power or the like the specialized skills or the time to have ever done anything like that. Like the book review when I was running it had a really great staff of editors and, and they were the ones who determine what should be review reviewed and they would come up with a list of potential reviewers and then in consultation with me and three of them other senior editors on my desk, we would each contribute names and then we would sort of come up with a list of like these are the people we want to go to. And you know, sometimes you wouldn't get the right person until like 10 people down the list. And then the other interesting thing. And again, I think that the, the methodology at the Book review has changed. So I don't want to speak for it now, but when I was there, which was from 2011 until 2022, 2 and as editor starting in 2013 when I was there, every book that was skipped, meaning the editor who handled that title said like this does not deserve a review. They needed to write up reasons for skipping it.
- [39:53]
B
Every book that was pitched but skipped, you had to justify skipping.
- [39:56]
A
You had to justify skipping it and then not only did so, you would
- [39:59]
B
just be like, this is a queer author and I don't like that.
- [40:01]
A
That's, that's right. And the skip notes were often fantastic. I felt like we should have created an anthology of skip notes. I remember one was long comma dense, comma French, and that was the skip note. But some of them would go on for several paragraphs. They're really well written because the editors are super smart and Then I would review the skip notes and then at least one other. And for most of the time that I was there, two other people would then also review the skip. And if any of us disagreed with the fact that this book was not being reviewed, we would overturn it. And you know, we wouldn't like unilaterally, but we'd have a conversation and we'd say like, look, I actually think this book is, you know, has certain merits or I think it has an argument that's worth contending with or I think the New York Times should weigh in on this. So those were like, that was the process. And it's not a dark secret either. Like I, there are conversations, I think, like on, you know, exciting places like Book TV and C Span and that kind of thing where I've gone through this and, and, and Sam Tenenhaus before me, like went through this and talked about the way that we handled the, assigning the selection of books.
- [41:13]
B
Well, we should, we should get to what is being claimed here. Okay, okay. Yeah, Sandy and I, I did not know that background and I found it very useful. I'm obviously being tongue in cheek when I suggest that you were systematically excluding queer writers. Partly because 2013-2022 does not strike me as a span when there was like an absence of discussion in the book section and elsewhere about these issues like as. As there should be. But there was a clear uptick. But so one thing, the author of this piece, right, Sandy Ernest Allen, particularly infamous was one explicitly anti trans essay from July 2022, which was widely created criticized at the time. It also had many people wondering how Paul's politics might have come into play in her decisions as the most important book's editor in the world. So the explicitly anti trans essay in question was titled the Far Right and the Far Left Agree on one thing, Women Don't Count. And it was about groups and activists saying we shouldn't use the word woman, which is, I think, a very mainstream opinion to believe that we should use the word woman. And this got transmogrified into an explicitly anti trans essay. Now at the time, do you remember the sort of feedback you got for that piece? I know it was a while ago and you might not.
- [42:31]
A
Oh, are you kidding? No, I mean, that piece was beloved. I mean, you know, look, the certain parts of the Internet got very upset and then lots of readers and New York Times readers specifically and commenters were happy about it. It's interesting because, you know, again, there's a tiny corner of the Internet and it's very, you know, and parts of academia and just sort of certain, you know, blocks in Brooklyn, et cetera. Like they all have a belief that they believe is universal and most regular people just have no idea. So actually for a lot of readers, it was very surprising. Like they did not realize that medical journals had adopted language that, you know, referred to things like pregnant people or menstruating people or people with, you know, vaginal openings or whatever the, you know, sort of sex neutral language was. And so like, to lots of people that was just like fresh reporting. Like they just weren't aware because a lot of people were not, you know, immeshed in this. And then, yes, some people got extremely angry and then assumed that like this instance of ideological nonconformity on my part meant that I had been secretly exerting a particular agenda while at the Book Review. Which again, to go back to, like, you know, all you need to do is a basic Google or I don't know, like, look through back issues of the Book Review during that period. Like, there was certainly no shortage of coverage of gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender people in the Book Review and also the reviewers. And one thing I will confess, I did not read through this entire Lit Hub anthology of overlooked writers, but several of them were contributors to the Book Review during the time I was there. Sort of surprising.
- [44:30]
B
Yeah, the ones who were, the ones who were lost, as the headline put
- [44:34]
A
it, they contributed or like writing the reviews of the lost people. So. And then the other interesting thing to point out is I use the statistic that my predecessor Sam Tanenhaus used and I think he pulled it out of thin air. But I will continue with that very accurate methodology and say that about 1% of books published in any given year, and that does not include self published works, are reviewed in pages of the New York Times. And that is simply a matter of speech.
- [45:05]
B
That sounds high. I'm surprised. It, it's, it's 1%. I would have thought lower.
- [45:09]
A
I'm sure it's lower.
- [45:10]
B
Totally. That made up statistic sounds fake.
- [45:12]
A
I'm sure it's fake. Yeah, don't, don't trust the New York Times with this.
- [45:17]
B
Or White Men.
- [45:17]
A
Yeah. Or, or the Karens. But in any case, very few books are reviewed at all. So there were many white people whose books were ignored. There were black people, there were indigenous writers, there were writers of poetry. There were. I mean, we used to say at the Book Review, when Sam came on it, there was like a thing, like a note that went out to anyone who wrote to Booksny Times dot which when I was there, I read every single one of those emails, which takes a lot of time. But there was a note that would say like we do not consider the following categories. And it had very few books in it, but it said self published works. It included westerns and it included textbooks. So there was very little that we didn't look at at all. And some of it, yes, we considered quite briefly before tossing the galley into to a recycling bin. But you know, it. There was only so much time and space. And this is a reason why frankly not to get into that conversation, but why there are so few book reviews anymore. I mean, I think there's only one newspaper book review with a full dedicated staff now that the Washington Post is Book World is gone. And that's the New York Times Book Review. And the reason is it's extremely labor intensive. And I know that they no longer, longer look at every book published anymore. I think that that was an official policy change after I left. But when I was there, we did like my, the, the idea was that whereas other news outlets were cherry picking like just like looking at the books and saying we want to do this, we want to do this. Like we were actually doing the work of going through all those books. And it is a lot of work. Yeah.
- [46:52]
B
Well, I just want to ask you like more broadly about. I don't. About not becoming a weirdo. Because I think you've done a good job not becoming a weirdo.
- [46:59]
A
Weirdo.
- [47:00]
B
I don't want to become a weirdo.
- [47:01]
A
But wait, how do we define a weirdo? Well, why am I not in this group?
- [47:06]
B
Stay tuned. I will define. Has to be a little bit frustrating when you read the actual text of your piece about using the word woman to later, years later see this described as an explicitly anti trans essay. Now I just want to get a feel for the piece. I'm going to read a little bit from it. Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women's rights, omits the word women from its homepage. Narrow Pro Choice America has used birthing people in lieu of women. The Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women's rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups, quote, black, indigenous and other people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, young people, end quote. Obviously, one group is missing there from, from those who are affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So the way I see this, and look, we're Obviously on the same page here, but like these major powerful, powerful liberal groups decided to change how they talk about the world and decided to not use women anymore. And you critique that, which is certainly like you're allowed to do that and that that gets portrayed as somehow anti trans. That has to be really frustrating. And I think one thing I'm worried about in the long run for my own work is like, how do you, you know, if you deal with a lot of this bullshit, you don't want this to define you. You don't want to be seen as a culture warrior. You want to be seen as a journalist and a writer. So how do you do that? Because I feel like you're at shielded from going crazy by the fact that you have like such a solid newsroomy job right now. That probably helps, right, to have so much other stuff to write about.
- [48:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I had, you know, as I said earlier, like, I started off writing for the economist in the 90s and then wrote largely for Time magazine. I'd written for places like the Washington Post and the Atlantic and Vogue, weirdly, always about like, incredibly horrible health conditions like staph infections. I don't think they do that work now, but I was, wrote those kind of stories for them and, and for the New York Times magazine, et cetera. It's interesting that you would think that that sort of would stay with you and people would be like, well, you know, like maybe. Maybe she did some reporting and work here. I, you know, I think that the world has turned into a. It doesn't, you know, it just doesn't matter. It's like whatever you did in the last five minutes. And I think of like, like there's this in, in the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a great book. You know, he. Which is arguing it's against the death penalty and he talks about death row inmates. And what he says is like, he has a saying of like, you are not the worst thing you have ever done. And I think of like that has become like, you're not the last thing you have ever done. And in an attention deficit Internet world, like that is, it is about the last thing that you have done. And like so many of conversations that you and Katie have about like some horrible thing that happened, you know, that someone tweeted or skeeted or whatever. Even people who have like impeccable progressive bonafides nonetheless, like all of that disappears and you're just the last horrible thing that you did. Or like someone like James Bennett, you know, was judged by the Tom Cotton essay and not judged by, for example, being the person who had hired Ta Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic. So. So I think that it's just trying to, like, hope that some kind of sober, long view reality persists. But I think, you know, this is a challenge not just for people like you and me, but it's just a challenge for the media and for truth in general that, like, nobody, the long term, like, long view has just disappeared from our mental horizons. And, you know, we're so bombarded by things that it doesn't, you know, for the people that got upset about that one particular column that I wrote while I was an opinion columnist at the New York Times, like, it didn't matter anything that had actually occurred before. Like the people who had written that lit hub thing, you know, it doesn't matter that the facts and the history completely belie their thesis. It's more like I am just going. And. And the other thing I found so crazy about it is, like, guys, you're still upset about this. Move on. One of the things that helped me keep my sanity when I was at the book review was that while Sam Tanenhaus was there and he hired me, I was the children's books editor. When I came on, he was in the hot seat. And the thing he was attacked about most frequently was not having enough women reviewers and books by women. And the second he left, left. Like, nobody dug him out of the wilderness, you know, and said, like, you know, and just sort of continued to harp on him like he was in the hot seat. He vacated the role and he moved on. And I sort of figured, certainly while I was there, any criticism that was directed at me. And for the record, like, I deliberately sort of set things up so that the criticism always would come at me. Like, no one would know who the editor was who had actually assigned a role review that pissed someone off or who, you know, who the fact checker was or whatever. Like, we deliberately didn't make those, Their identities public. And, you know, now it's a little harder, like, with everyone being on Instagram reels and, like, their faces are all out there and their personalities, but, like, at that time, they were very much behind the scenes and whatever arrows were flung at the book review. Like, I was just the person who was there, but it didn't bother me because I knew it wasn't about me. It was just like whoever was in that seat took the, you know, took the incoming, and I knew it wasn't personal. So it's interesting to me that, like, I don't know, part of me feels like, guys, now you have something fresh to be upset about, like, find something new. Surely there are other causes for outrage.
- [53:05]
B
No, I think just whatever the New York Times is doing is most important thing. Just, just for the purposes of disclosure, people did get mad that you assigned me to review Trans When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce, which was a whole blow up. But I'll just include a link to the review and people can.
- [53:23]
A
Oh, can I say something?
- [53:25]
B
Sure.
- [53:26]
A
Okay, so. And I hope this doesn't upset you, but what's interesting is, you know, that was a very hard book to assign. And one of the reasons why I was assigning it rather than another editor at the Book Review is, again, I felt like, look, I knew this was going to be a hot potato kind of book and I didn't want any of my other editors to have to deal with it because, you know, it's not fun. And I felt like, well, I'm the person at the top making a little more money than everyone else. So, like, I will take. I will. I will take this bullet and do this work because it. You just, you know, whatever. So the other thing is that it was very hard book to assign because they were. You know, one of the things we tried hard to do at the Book Review was to find someone who we felt like would give a book an honest assessment and not apply a particular ideological lens and certainly not a personal animus or personal relationship with.
- [54:21]
B
Sorry, you were unable to find someone like that.
- [54:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, no, instead we had to. We had to, you know, slum it with you. Yeah, no, but also someone who might have some expertise and. And someone who didn't. Hadn't staked out a position on it. And so, like, on an issue like transgender rights and transgender issues, like, that's really hard. Like, people are either on one side or the other or they're staying quiet. And that, frankly, was the majority. And so I will confess here, and don't take this as the wrong way, Jesse, because I never said. Would say this publicly otherwise because lots of times our first choice reviewers and, you know, said no. And our second choice and third choice, and then we would get someone who was our fifth choice and they did a fantastic job. But I did approach other people before you. Not because I didn't think you would do a good job, because I knew that you would, but because you had had, I think, an email interaction with the author of some kind. And again, we tried to. To avoid any kind of no.
- [55:18]
B
We got a meal once, which I told you I'd have to disclose. And you tracked in dates.
- [55:21]
A
You disclosed it. You disclosed it. Yes. So it was even worse than an email you had leveled up to in person interaction. And frankly, like, normally that's something that we'd really try to avoid, but there were a lot of writers, not so many. There were several people I thought would be very good on this book who did not break bread with the author. And they said no. And they said no for reasons that I absolutely understood. Reasons like, no, I can't do this. My department would have my, you know, if I wrote what I really thought, I. My department would fire me or have, you know, I'd be the black sheep or I have a book coming out and I can't sink it. My publisher would kill me if I did something like this or, you know, like, I have, you know, kids that I don't want to. I mean, people had really good reasons not to want to wade into this. And for better or worse, you had already, by dint of your Atlantic cover story on this subject, had weathered that storm. And so, you know, I guess, like, your goose was already cooked or whatever. Like you didn't, you know, it wasn't a stumbling block for you. So I just said that, you know, you need to disclose that relationship in the piece. And I will say here that I think you did a really good job and you were fair minded. And it wasn't, you know, like, it wasn't a rave review. I thought it was a very fair minded, you know, bit of literary criticism. And I also book criticism. And there have been far worse, far worse conflicts of interest that were had, you know, have happened in the book reviews passed.
- [56:53]
B
Oh, I don't, I can't even imagine behind the scenes stuff about like, who is secretly someone else's enemy and then gets to review their.
- [57:00]
A
Oh my God. I mean, we had like one of one story that didn't happen while I was the editor, but happened while I was at the book review. That was a favorite story that we would tell is like, there was someone who, you know, they're clearing all the possible conflicts of interest and they're like, do you have any conflicts? Do you? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And at one point the writer said, well, listen, I used to sleep with her, but like, we haven't slept together in years. I think I would totally fair. Needless to say, that person did not get the assignment.
- [57:26]
B
Well, I appreciated that assignment. I will say I'm in a weird and lucky situation where I'm sort of gainfully employed despite not having a job. I think if I'd been at an institution, it probably would have been hard for me to do that review, and I would have had to say no. But enough about me. Well, there's a few other things I want to discuss, one of which is just this broader phenomenon of this sort of politicization of the online literary world is there's, like, this Balkanization going on that's interesting. It's obviously not the case, or not quite the case that there's a woke mob that will prevent you entirely from publishing or promoting a book if you have the wrong views. My friend Kat Rosenfield, who's no friend of any hypothetical woke mobs that may exist, she's on a book tour for her new book, how to Survive in the woods, which I haven't read. I'm sorry, Kat. I'm very eager to. Because she's an extremely talented novelist. Novelist. By any measure, She's a successful writer, even though she's reviled by a subset of leftier publishing types. But what does seem to happen is, like, if you're a certain type of writer with the quote, unquote, wrong views, you'll sort of just get iced out of mainstream literary spaces. Is that. Is that fair to say?
- [58:40]
A
That's fair to say. You know, it's a very insular world. And, you know, like historians of the literary world will say, it has always been a very insular world, but I think that it has become very risk. Increasingly risk adverse. You know, for example, Pan America, I think, would not be honoring J.K. rowling or the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack, both of whom, you know, they honored in the past. I don't think that those. Those would happen today. And I think that I. Tell me if there's a good metaphor for this, because I'll tell you what my metaphor is. And it's so. So lame that it needs a better one, but it's like an echo chamber that gets increasingly small. And the way I think about it is there's a game that my kids used to play on the phone called Slitherio, where you're like a worm, sort of like Centipede, where you had to, like, circle around something until you smothered it to death. And so, like, the worm.
- [59:42]
B
Like, that's a dark game for a kid to play.
- [59:44]
A
Yeah, I know. Death, destruction, warfare. There were no guns. It was just. It was just strangling, you know, smoke, smothering worms. But until, like, the Circle just got so small that you crushed the thing to death. And I, when I think about the literary world, I think of it that way. Like it's just, it is to ever increasing degrees, excluding in the name of inclusion in a way that I find like self defeating, paradoxical, and also frankly, financially ruinous for an industry that already faces threats from things like one, you can do a lot of other things in your spare time rather than read books. And two, AI So I feel like we don't need this on top of everything else.
- [60:30]
B
I do not have a better metaphor, but it's interesting because. Okay, so I heard you on Sarah Heppel and Nancy Rommelman's podcast Smoke Em if youf Got Em, we'll link to it. In the show notes, you mentioned how J.K. rowling's latest mystery novel as Robert Galbraith, was just completely ignored by American outlets. You said, quote, you cannot pretend culture out of existence. Since JK Rowling slash Robert Galbraith, they'll be fine. But it's this weird situation where they have huge numbers of fans. Cat Rosenfield has a large and growing fan base. Lionel Shriver, who you wrote about in the Wall Street Journal, has, you know, also sort of older, more experienced writer than Kat, a bigger fan. I mean, like their fans aren't going to go away. People love the books. It's just this weird thing where it's like pretending they don't exist. And I think you're onto something there that it's like if you go on lid hub, there's a lot of righteous outrage. But what percentage of the population holds these views on these subjects? It's sort of. They are making themselves irrelevant, I guess.
- [61:34]
A
I mean, the other interesting thing is that in an age in which people are constantly decrying gatekeepers, which just for the record, I'm in favor of gatekeepers, but nonetheless, there are people who hate gatekeepers. Gatekeepers. It's weird that the gatekeepers in this, in the, on the culture remain more, you know, powerful than ever. They're just it. And yet there is no recognition of that inherent contradiction.
- [62:00]
B
It's just, it's just, it's dumb because are we gonna have a situation where like if things keep headed in this direction, maybe they're always like this, like, Kat Rosenfield will have to a book book tour at problematic bookstores and problematic venues and then other people will be lefty venues just like, like. Well, also like if you're, if you're a 25 year old aspiring writer now and you happen to not you know, you're merely 70th percentile of American leftism rather than 90th, you're not going to feel very welcome. And that just seems injurious to literature itself.
- [62:31]
A
And you know, just to offer further backup to the aforementioned Jacob Savage's essay, it is absolutely true that certainly when I was at the book's book review and in other conversations I've had with people in publishing, if you were a straight white male for a very long time coming out and wanting to be in the literary world, it was almost impossible to get any kind of foothold in the industry. Now, weirdly, I mean, I did hear from someone who did hire in publishing within the last couple of years, an assistant who was a straight white male and could make the argument, look, there are none in the entire department, so like this would actually be diversity and managed to get it through. But it's. Yeah, I'm not like anti diversity anything, but we have to be aware of what you mean when you talk about diversity. And I've always thought about it in the broadest possible way, which includes viewpoint diversity, which has now become like a, it now has a bad smell. Cause I think someone in the Trump administration has used that phrase, which then immediately gives things an ideological.
- [63:46]
B
And you have a good piece about this as well, I should mention in the Wall Street Journal, like campus initiatives toward viewpoint diversity.
- [63:52]
A
Yeah. Or ideological diversity or just life experience diversity. I mean there are lots of, there are lots of points of view that were underrepresented in the book review when I was there, whether it was like military and former middle military views, rural writers, Southern writers, Western writers. Like there was one of the forms of diversity that I was attentive to was geographic diversity. Like more international coverage, just more like other parts of America than where you over there in California these days and where I am here in New York.
- [64:24]
B
So just final thing I want to discuss this gets directly to that question of the people who are on the 20% side of an 8020 issue and how much influence they have. My old publication, New York Magazine last year ran a piece by Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic Andrea Long Chu. Goodbye, Pamela Paul, the contrarian columnist showed us the intolerable side of liberalism. This has been nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors award. The asmys, they're a very big deal, right? They're sort of the Oscars of nerdy magazine writing.
- [65:00]
A
Yes.
- [65:02]
B
So I mean, Chu is sort of, she's our leading literary critic here and I'm sort of talking about her with one Hand tied behind my back because I don't know anything about literature and I can't really judge her as a literary critic. I. I think this excerpt from a New Yorker piece sums her style up nicely. In 2023, Chu was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, quote, for book reviews that scrutinize authors as well as their books. End quote. Another way to put this is that she is less interested in the formal intricacies of literature than in bullying those who create it. Why shouldn't a book review be personal? She asked in authority. That's a collection of essays. It is my understanding that persons are where books come from. Her reviews are assuredly pedantic body bouncily propulsive, and so fun to read that you can lose track of how disproportionate their punishment is. To the cr. As Chu puts it, quote, viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days. Cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days, I aim for cruelty. So, look, she doesn't like me. She's mentioned me.
- [66:02]
A
She has her. Put her cards on the table.
- [66:04]
B
Yeah. I mean, what was it like just to be the focus of this essay? And we can get into some of the details if you want to.
- [66:14]
A
Oh, well. Well, it was frankly kind of surprising because I grew up reading New York magazine. Some of my favorite writers have written for New York Magazine. They published a few things and made a few editorial decisions maybe three or four years ago that had me unsubscribe from them for the first time since I was a teenager. So that felt like.
- [66:38]
B
What made you unsubscribe?
- [66:39]
A
Oh, God, that'll turn into a whole long tangent.
- [66:44]
B
I want the drama.
- [66:45]
A
You want the drama. Oh, you know, no, let's not go there. It's. It's just. It's. You know, they were specific things.
- [66:53]
B
You can tell how good a journalist I am because instead of pushing, just, like, keep up.
- [66:57]
A
No, in any case, that is interesting
- [67:01]
B
that someone like you, who is, like, at the center of this world, chose to unsubscribe to New York magazine. And I should just say I'm no longer. I was a subscriber. I'm not a paying sub. No, I can't. I can't. I can't do it.
- [67:13]
A
Yeah. I mean, what were your reasons?
- [67:15]
B
They. The, like, complete hollowing out of anyone who just provides sort of a different perspective. I'm thinking of, like, Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chate and the.
- [67:27]
A
Although Jonathan Chate left of his own volition, I can't remember. I think Sullivan was sort of.
- [67:32]
B
Yes. I don't know the. I'm not. Sullivan was pushed out. Cheat. I'm not. I don't know the backstory story, if I had to guess, gun to head. There's a reason he moved to the Atlantic, including just this ridiculous. Getting dragged over nothing publicly by one of his own fact checkers. They just like. They've become a little bit of a basket case. And increasingly on the one issue where I feel I can judge, which is the youth, gender, medicine stuff post Sullivan and post Chait, the stuff they've written has just been unconscionably bad. Including Andrea Longchu cover story that I think we probably won't have time to get into. But yeah, I just, I just, I sort of.
- [68:09]
A
One where she wanted children to be able to change genders at will, regardless of their parents.
- [68:14]
B
Yeah. Or regardless of their mental health problems. And where she never gets around to actually arguing why. I mean, it was. It was sort of. Oh, man, there's so many different roads we could go down now. It was. I found that to be.
- [68:24]
A
I know, I know. Let's stick to the path. Yeah, exactly.
- [68:27]
B
The path. That's good marketing for your book. I just, I also, I sort of like feel like I'm reading a bunch of writers who. Not me personally, but people like me just like, sort of loathe people like me. And that's like. I don't know, like, maybe that's like narcissistic because, like, I don't, I don't want to pay people who despise, like liberals to like keep shitting on. Does that. Is that dumb? Am I being immature?
- [68:52]
A
No, no, I think those are all. All fair criticisms and observations. I mean, I do think that for something to call itself like a, A journalistic outlet, they do need to be open minded, curious and interested in pursuing the truth, even when the truth is unfavorable to their own deeply held beliefs. And by that measure, I don't think New York Magazine is journalistic anymore in any. I don't know, it's just not.
- [69:17]
B
They still have good people and good articles. Of course, I'm not. This isn't like a blank.
- [69:21]
A
Yeah, no. I mean, I like their product recommendations are fun and stuff, but yeah, that's. That said, I thought it was interesting. It was an interesting again to me. I guess I thought of this more as an editor. If a literary critic decided to write a piece of literary criticism about a human being as literary object, some questions I might ask are, did you reach out to the writer in question if you were going to profile that person. Which again, it occupied this weird space where I'm like, it wasn't a literary criticism of me. It was sort of a ad hominem attack. And it was sort of like a
- [70:06]
B
takedown of your, of your, of your project.
- [70:09]
A
Yeah, I mean, of my. Of quote, unquote, my project. I feel like we need like several quote marks around it because what I found, like, most interesting about it, and I should say, like, I cannot get into Andrea Long Chu's head. I cannot imagine what her thinking was on this. And I wouldn't dare do that because she clearly didn't do that for me. And so, you know, I, I like, I guess unlike her approach, like, I don't, I don't claim to know what goes inside someone's head based on opinion columns they've written or like very.
- [70:44]
B
Yeah, let, let me, let me just read one paragraph just to get her, like, thesis out there. Is that okay?
- [70:49]
A
Sure.
- [70:49]
B
There is limited utility in devoting our attention to a person so rarely visited by serious belief. I mean, this isn't like a 5,5000 word essay, so that's, whatever. But Paul is a good example of an all too serious intellectual movement that has emerged from the wreckage of the Obama years when, quote unquote, post racial liberal optimism began to curdle into open contempt for liberatory struggles like Black Lives Matter or the fight for universal health care. I think of it as the Far center. Yeah, A loose coalition of disillusioned democrats, principled humanists, state centrists, anti woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and two toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left. The Far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions. It is against cancel culture, student protests and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals, concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the Far center is liberal in that its highest value is freedom, but it is also reactive, reactionary in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice. I mean, do you. Is there any of this that rings a bell for you? Or do you think this is just purely sort of ad hominem or what?
- [72:00]
A
No, I mean, I thought it was very creative and she sold a book deal off it called the Far Center. So I think maybe that was the primary function.
- [72:07]
B
Wait, really?
- [72:07]
A
Yes, yes.
- [72:08]
B
Someone the Far center is going to be a book.
- [72:10]
A
It's going to be a book. Yes. So, again, this is my slitherio metaphor at work. You know, this is like. This is delivering up what a certain group of people want. And can I.
- [72:21]
B
Well, let me. Let me just put my chips on the table in one sense. And we're getting into, like, territory where we both have a little bit. I have a little bit of resentment. She's like. I think she, like, is dishonest in how she portrays writing, but just. I'll put some chips on the table. The Far center is like a two onlines person's vision of a club. Clever idea. I do not think a book about the Far center is going to sell. I say this. I know, because I have a book that needs to sell.
- [72:50]
A
Well, you know what? It'll get a lot of media coverage.
- [72:52]
B
It'll get a lot of media coverage. No one actually thinks there's like, even her description of it. She just loops together everyone she doesn't like.
- [73:00]
A
Well, okay, so I. Two things. So just to get back to that first point, like, as an editor, I would have been like, okay, like, what is the. You know, what is the reason for this piece to exist? Is this the best use of our time? You're a literary critic. Like, why. Why publish this? So, like, that' one question that, as an editor might have been instructive to ask. And, you know, I don't know what. What took place in the editorial process. It. When it came out, it was so. It was so, like, ridiculous. Like, the people that, you know, I just got like a. I got a torrent of fan mail and support because people were just like, oh, my God, like, how is it. And also, just people were like, how did this get past an editor? So then it's like yet another decision to nominate it, and then yet another decision to, I guess, name it a finalist. But, you know, again, I don't know who the judges were and what decisions were. And it might be that Andrea Long Chu just, you know, walks on water at the New York magazine. I don't know. I. I can't really speculate about that. But I will say that, you know, when I was at the book review, one of. One of the editors on staff was really keen to assign Andrea Long to a review. And I know that. That we asked her to review at least once. I cannot recall if she actually wrote a review, but. So, you know, for whatever lithub person thinks, we didn't go to members of the genderqueer community, we did but in any case, I thought it was as for the first center. Yeah, people really love naming things.
- [74:38]
B
She does that a lot. She came up with a successor to TERFs that she called Tarles. And then on Blue sky there's reactionary centrist. And this is all, all just, it seems to be just different names of the same phenomenon, which is like, they don't, the people who use these names don't like it when people left of center criticized the left. It'd be more honest to just be like, we don't, we don't think you should do that.
- [75:00]
A
Right, right. I mean, it is like essentially what she's talking about are liberals as opposed to progressives, and, and some people call them reactionary centrists. Like, I think that, you know, there are a whole number of people that there is an attempt to, you know, lump together as just like, this is a bad thing and against what we like. The piece named a few other writers who I really enjoy, Zadie Smith and David Steris and Adam Gopnik as being, you know, my fellow fellow travelers in this far center movement. So I didn't feel like I was in terrible company, but it did seem like it a curious use of her time. And I also thought, you know, it. I had actually been open to the idea that, like, maybe she's a really good book critic. As I said, like when I was the editor. I know we tried to assign to her at the Book review, but it makes me then doubt her capacity if she's so incapable of reading a person and their ideas, because the character she wrote about was like, bore no resemblance whatsoever to either me or my politics or my convictions or my methods that it made me doubt her book criticism. So I was like, wow, like if, if, if, if this is her way of working, like, what does that mean for her book reviews?
- [76:22]
B
Well, this jumped out at me and I want to get your response to this. It is a great dream of the reactionary liberal. I guess that's another, another term if you're not a far centrist. Your reactionary liberal is a great dream of the reactionary liberal not to be reached. Paul will freely admit, for instance, that it is immoral for Israel to kill tens of thousands of. Of civilians, yet it is no less immoral for student protesters to erect an ugly encampment in the middle of the quad and hurl slogans at the police. And she links to a piece you read, but in the piece you didn't. That's like a pretty big accusation that you think it's Just as bad to kill tens of thousands of civilians as for protesters on the quad to be rude.
- [77:01]
A
I guess I let go of the fact checkers.
- [77:03]
B
I guess it's not a question because I know, I mean, this is, it's just sort of idiotic because she's, she does this a lot. She'll sort of say person X wrote or said this when she didn't. I just don't know what. I guess. Yeah. What do you do with the literary critic who doesn't really care if she's like telling the truth about the people she's criticizing? Yeah.
- [77:22]
A
I mean, at the book review.
- [77:23]
B
So for the record, you think, you think a single student protester being rude is worse than 10,000 Palestinian deaths?
- [77:28]
A
Yeah.
- [77:28]
B
Just to get that on the record, obviously.
- [77:30]
A
Obviously. I mean, at the book review we had a saying which was like, you should be able to, able, you can. You should disagree or be free to disagree with our reviews, but you shouldn't distrust them.
- [77:43]
B
Yeah.
- [77:44]
A
And so for that reason we were really rigorous about fact checking because if you got the tiniest thing wrong, like if you said someone was holding a red umbrella, but it was a chartreuse umbrella, then you know, the author and any reader could say like, well, this reviewer clearly didn't even read the book if they can't get the color of the umbrella right.
- [78:00]
B
Yeah.
- [78:00]
A
So I guess like New York magazine maybe like let go of its fact checking stuff or, or you know, they're just like, it might not have been, you know, there just might not have been a desire really to, to, to check it against the facts. But it's, you know, I think, I think Andrea Long Chu is a very, can be a very stylish writer.
- [78:21]
B
She's undeniably.
- [78:22]
A
She came up with a lot of really fun and interesting metaphors for me. Like there was one that was. Had like an earthworm and I was like, wow, that's so, you know, it's so interesting to read about this so called Pamela Paul written about in this way. But it didn't like in terms of bearing any connection to the truth like that I didn't see.
- [78:43]
B
Yeah. Okay.
- [78:46]
A
That's my review of that review.
- [78:48]
B
Yeah. We can leave it at that. I want to leave also leave a little bit of time for our primo questions, but for the freeloaders. Thank you for listening. This has been blocked reported as always. We are produced with help from Jesse the 80s baby. And thank you for joining us, Pamela.
- [79:02]
A
Thank you so much for having me.