Fiction’s Lost Ambition with Writer Sam Kahn

Summary

Podcast Summary: Fiction’s Lost Ambition with Writer Sam Khan

Podcast: New Books Network – America and Beyond
Host: Paul Starabin
Guest: Sam Khan (Writer, Publisher of the Castalia Substack, Editor at Persuasion, Founder of Republic of Letters)
Date: April 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Paul Starabin engages in a wide-ranging conversation with writer and editor Sam Khan about the diminished status and ambition of contemporary fiction; the forces shaping literary culture today; the effects of publishing, technology, and MFA programs; and avenues for renewal via projects like Substack and Khan’s own Republic of Letters. The discussion oscillates between lament for fiction’s lost centrality and optimism about new models fostering creative freedom and diverse voices.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introducing Sam Khan & His Literary Projects

[01:19–04:49]

• Sam's Background:
  • Former documentary filmmaker; became a “compulsive Substack addict” around 2022 and began Castalia, a personal Substack focused on literary criticism but also politics, book reviews, and fiction.
• The Name "Castalia":
  • Reference to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game—an idealized scholarly society.
• Editorial Work:
  • Editor for Persuasion (Yascha Mounk’s large-subscription Substack, "often a bit against the grain" [03:13]).
• Republic of Letters:
  • Khan’s distinct initiative: “crowdsourced literary magazine” curating submissions with a “writer first” philosophy.
  • Notable for including working-class voices seldom heard in mainstream publishing.
  • Example: “I think our top contributor lives in, like, adult foster care... these things about, you know, living in adult foster care, some of the abuse she’s had, and they’re just really good.” [04:23]

The Decline of Fiction’s Cultural Centrality

[07:41–11:59]

• Fiction’s Marginalization:
  • “Fiction is not in a healthy place... it’s not at the center of the discourse.” [08:17]
  • Comparison to TV and movies: pop culture touchstones are now mostly visual media, with few universally recognized literary characters since perhaps Harry Potter.
  • “Fiction... it’s basically lost its market share. It’s lost its centrality within the public.” [09:53]
• Ambition & Lament:
  • Starabin: “This is a lament.”
  • Khan: “It’s a fact. Yeah, it’s also a... I mean, I’m a partisan of fiction. I love it. I think it’s more interesting than anything else.” [10:40]
  • Phones and digital media blamed for cultural shift towards "post-literacy”—“We are kind of moving into like a post-literacy era... you lose certain complexities of your mind with that.” [11:25]
• Effects on the Reader and Imagination:
  • The loss of interiority and continuity with the past.

Lost Ambition: What Has Changed, and When?

[11:59–14:27]

• When Fiction Was Ambitious:
  • Starabin reminisces about the grand ambitions of 19th-century novels (e.g., Bleak House, Sons and Lovers): books that “define the era” and offer immersive portraits of time, place, and culture.
  • Asks for recent counterexamples; highlights Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead as a possibly ambitious, bestselling exception, capturing the opioid epidemic in Appalachia.

Structural Forces & Publishing Realities

[14:27–18:20]

• Not a Talent Issue:
  • Khan: “What I’m not saying is that writers have gone away. There are lots and lots of ambitious writers... I’m trying to keep the discourse... to the structural stuff.”
• Impact of Technology and Market Forces:
  • Technological determinism: the rise of TV, then social media, changed conditions—"forms sort of hit their maturity... then there is a certain technological determinism.”
  • Publishing trends: books “getting smaller and smaller because attention spans are getting shorter.” Industry incentives push writers toward commercial, less ambitious works.
  • “What they write just gets schlockier and more dishonest and worse and worse.” [17:08]
  • Desire to build independent review ecosystems that celebrate under-recognized but excellent writers.

The MFA-Industrial Complex & Its Discontents

[18:20–24:38]

• Debate on Writing Programs:
  • MFA programs often blamed for sameness and political orthodoxy ("super woke" since ~2015). Yet, Khan considers them more as symptoms than sole causes.
  • “They just needed to buy hook or by crook. They needed to make a living for themselves... actually the only way that anybody ever gets basically paid to write or to do anything with writing...” [19:40]
  • Youth and lack of lived experience among MFA students; programs reward “people who are students” rather than those with real-world freedom or edge.
  • "From everything I can tell, the atmosphere in the MFAs is just not great... you have to toe some lines." [21:35]

Gatekeeping: Agents, Publishers, and the Market

[21:02–24:38]

• The Role of Agents:

  • Agents now powerful gatekeepers, primarily focused on moving product and protecting their “15%,” not necessarily prioritizing craft.
  • “...they become the gatekeepers. But they're entirely concerned with getting their, you know, 15%.” [21:35]

• Industry Structure’s Effects:

  • The “arts bureaucratic chains” that stifle independence.
  • Substack and other online platforms as new avenues: “...I would love to get rid of some of these... chains that don't really have to do with making good writing.” [24:26]

TV as the New Ambitious Fiction?

[24:38–30:07]

• Pop Culture’s Shifting Role:

  • “In terms of the culture... shows like on HBO... those are in a way, you know, kind of like the big ambitious novels that were once written.” [24:38]
  • Khan: “That probably is the great American novel... Mad Men.” [26:42]
  • “The psychological complexity is much greater in The Wire than it is in Dickens or Dreiser.” [27:14]
  • Limitations acknowledged—TV is expensive and exclusive; most writers never see their own work realized in this way.

• Advantages of Literary Fiction:

  • “Whatever else you say about it, you have creative control... it’s very pure art. It needs to exist.” [29:19]
  • TV’s rise has “swallowed up” much of literary fiction’s market role.

The “Genre” Debate & Writerly Freedom

[30:07–35:46]

• Genre’s Marketplace Role:

  • Starabin: "Do you have to have an answer to the question of what genre you're writing for... is that just a logical outcome of a consumer capitalist marketplace?"
  • Khan: “It’s all just ways of moving product... this literary fiction term showed up at some point and... that’s getting kind of squeezed further and further.” [31:38]

• Writerly Ethics and Psychological Depth:

  • “A good writer should be able to write anything... what writing is really about is a kind of psychological maturity.” [32:44]
  • On confronting the self and the uncomfortable: “Fiction is... an incredible tool for... allowing you in the safe but uncomfortable way to go and just explore everything. You know, touch all demons...” [33:33]

• Blurring Genre Boundaries:

  • Many writers successfully merge literary and genre fiction; “Game of Thrones is technically genre, but it’s bigger than anything else.”

Literary Journals and Their Narrowing Influence

[35:46–39:24]

• The Limits of Lit Mags:

  • Journals have narrow interests, often tightly circumscribed by funding and politics; “they get more narrow and narrower. You never want to read what they're doing.” [38:08]
  • The problem: “It can seem very narrow. It's like, okay, here's a literary journal and here is very specifically kind of exactly what they're interested in...” [35:46]
  • Substack and web projects can bypass this with lower overhead and greater freedom.

• The Turn from Realism:

  • Younger audiences favor fantasy and genre over social realism; question raised as to why realism lost its cachet.

The Age of Upheaval: Where Are Fiction’s Big Books?

[40:15–45:25]

• Literature as Cultural Diagnosis:

  • Starabin: “Where is the big book in fiction that’s going to speak to the times in which we’re living?” [41:51]
  • Khan: “Where’s the intensity? That’s kind of the big thing.” [41:51]
  • He recalls the example of Eastern European and Soviet writers who wrote with intensity despite (even because of) adversity—“They wrote really interesting stuff. A lot of it’s very political, not necessarily didactic...” [43:16]
  • The desire for American writers to embrace that same passion and pride.

• Literary Response to War and Turmoil:

  • “We saw The Naked and the Dead... Catch-22... I don’t know that we’ve seen the great novel that’s embedded in the 2003 Iraq war...” [45:25]
  • Hesitancy or market intransigence toward war novels and political engagement in fiction.

Wokeness, Market Trends, & The Shrinking Big Book

[46:46–49:14]

• ‘Woke’ as a Symptom, Not the Cause:
  • Wave of “wokeness” downstream from economic fears in publishing: “They started to get scared at one level when woke was coming... and then at another level, I think they recognized that it was sort of good for business...” [46:52]
• Shorter, Less Ambitious Books:
  • Popular books shrinking in length—attention spans diminished, so “writers don’t really bother” attempting grand novels; publishers unlikely to select them.
  • The mid-century’s wars and crises forced literary ambition; today’s relative insulation creates smallness and a retreat into “twenty-somethings wandering around New York City... complaining about being that.” [48:46]

The New Yorker & Literary Establishment

[49:14–55:31]

• Critique of The New Yorker:

  • Starabin: “A lot of New Yorker stories just feel really small.” [50:48]
  • Inertia and insiderism; stories chosen from a narrow pool via agents; editors admit, “it’s kind of like ten other stories that are exactly like it...” [51:09]
  • Documentary footage reveals the magazine’s distance from broader society, especially class divides.
  • “To me, it’s just symptomatic of a certain rot that’s gone with kind of the professional class.” [54:29]

• Need for Artistic Renewal:

  • “Fresh blood doesn’t necessarily just mean new people. It also means just rejuvenating yourself.” [55:06]

Optimism: Independent Publishing & Creative Democracy

[55:31–End]

• The Promise of Substack & Alternatives:
  • Starabin: “I think you’re showing that there are certainly a lot of alternatives out there... it’s just like taking down the whole casemaker, gatekeeper type function.” [55:31]
  • Khan sees his own journey as proof of what’s possible outside legacy systems: pursuing “pride,” “honor” and the deeper, riskier artistic impulse.

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• On Fiction’s Place in Culture:
  • Sam Khan: “Fiction is not in a healthy place in this society, and it’s not at the center of the discourse.” [08:17]
• On the Post-Literacy Era:
  • “We are kind of moving into like a post-literacy era... you lose the ability to develop interiority, to really have continuity with the past...” [11:25]
• On What’s Missing:
  • Paul Starabin: “Where is the big book in fiction that’s going to speak to the times in which we’re living?” [41:51]
• On Literary Artistry and Independence:
  • “Whatever else you say about it, you have creative control. Like, that’s you writing. And so to me, it’s just a very pure form. It’s very pure art. It needs to exist.” [29:19]
• On Writerly Courage:
  • “I want people to live in a way that they can be proud of. I want ideas like honor to come back... if you’re... following the path of creativity and writing, that’s what you should be choosing for.” [43:42]
• On the Literary Industrial Complex:
  • “There’s basically nobody at any point in the system who’s just thinking about like, what are we really trying to do with the art here? How can we be as kind of bold and interesting and risk taking with our art?” [21:35]

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• Introduction to Sam Khan and Projects: [01:19–04:49]
• Fiction’s Cultural Decline: [07:41–11:59]
• Debate on ‘Ambitious Fiction’: [11:59–14:27]
• Industry Structure & Publishing Practices: [14:27–18:20]
• MFAs & Gatekeeping: [18:20–24:38]
• TV as the New ‘Novel’: [24:38–30:07]
• Genre, Literary Journalism, and Realism: [30:07–39:24]
• Literature in an Age of Upheaval: [40:15–45:25]
• The New Yorker and Literary Elitism: [49:14–55:31]
• Closing Optimism on Indie Publishing: [55:31–End]

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Closing Thoughts

Paul Starabin and Sam Khan’s conversation is a passionate, sometimes mournful, often hopeful exploration of fiction’s evolving role and obstacles in 21st-century culture. Khan insists on the unique power and necessity of ambitious literary fiction—even as he turns to new platforms and philosophies to foster its future. Listeners are left with both a nuanced diagnosis of the current malaise and a tenacious belief in renewal through creative risk, independence, and a return to literary pride.

Transcript

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[Sam Khan]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Paul Starabin]

Hello, everyone. I'm Paul Starabin, and welcome to American beyond, the New Books Network. My guest today is Sam Khan. He's the publisher of the Castelia substack and does lots of other various things which we can talk about. Welcome, Sam, to America and Beyond.

[Sam Khan]

Thank you, Paul. Nice to be with you.

[Paul Starabin]

So, yeah, tell me a little bit about what you're up to, because other than Castilia, you're obviously very active out there on Substack and in various other ways. So I'll let you sort of, you know, summarize yourself.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, basically, I'm kind of a compulsive substack addict, so.

[Paul Starabin]

Oh.

[Sam Khan]

So I started. Yeah, I mean, I always wanted to be a writer. I was always kind of looking for a way to break into writing. I was mostly working in documentary film. And then in 2022, I kind of found substack, and I really went pretty much all in from the beginning with it. So I was writing for Castalia is kind of my personal substack, which is basically whatever I feel like writing. It's a lot of literary criticism, I suppose, but I was putting on political essays and book reviews, and at the beginning, a lot of fiction. And the name.

[Paul Starabin]

Tell us, tell us what the name comes from.

[Sam Khan]

I know nobody's recognized it, so it's a reference to Hermann Hesse's the Glass Bead Game. So Castalia is this sort of idealized kind of university type where they're just. They're contemplating basically their thinking. So that's what that is. And. And then through that, I got a job with Persuasion, which is run by Yasha Monk and is kind of a. A big substack elephant. So That's. That's over 100,000 subscribers. That's politics. There's more of kind of an old school style of funding, so I edit for that.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, no, I like persuade. Persuasion is good. Often a bit against the grain.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, I mean, we're. We're liberal. That's kind of our thing. But to be liberal now often means pushing against sort of progressive excesses as well as all kinds of other people. And so that's. That's my main job. And then a year ago, I started something called the Republic of Letters, which is, I guess the way to describe it is kind of a crowdsourced literary magazine. So I don't do a lot of editing. It's more curation. I sort of put out calls for different themes. Sometimes I'll line up debates with people, and then pieces come in, and if we like them, we pretty much just publish them. So it's really like writer first is a philosophy, really let people have their voice. Some of it skews kind of like literary. A lot of reflections on books. But what's been interesting and surprising is that, I mean, not so surprisingly, people are very good at personal essays. People are better at talking about themselves than anything else. Surprisingly, it's become sort of a real hub for, like, working class writing. So a lot of test pieces have been by, you know, maids and janitors and flight attendants and cashiers and people. It's really cool. And it's like. I think our top contributor lives in, like, adult foster care, and she has these, like, manic episodes where she emails the list and then. But then she'll. These things about, you know, living in adult foster care, some of the abuse she's had, and they're just really good.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, that's cool. I think the phrase republic, I mean, that comes. Doesn't. An Italian poet of medieval times, I think, was the one who coined that.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, yeah. The next time I have a podcast, I need to look it up a little bit.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, I think you'll find that to be the case. So, you know, I've always. I've always liked that. Phrase, the Republic of Letters.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, Yeah, I like it too. I mean, I think what it refers to is that there was kind of this network of people sending words to each other in like the 17th, 18th century is important for the scientific enlightenment. But yeah, then it turned out after it launches, turned out there was a magazine in the 90s that had this. So they're like the. The phrase.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, no, no, it's. It's just a common currency at this point. But what I also like about it is, and maybe this can reflect on what we'll be talking about more is that it sort of crosses boundaries, like national boundaries and so forth. So it's a way of just binding together people who could be from almost anywhere with certain common interests and tastes.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, that's a feeling. I mean, I get very. I can be kind of snobby and difficult in other ways, but there's a way.

[Paul Starabin]

I don't believe it if.

[Sam Khan]

Well, I believe it, but there's a way in which I've. I have a very kind of idyllic perspective on certain kinds of writing.

[Paul Starabin]

Just.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, I feel like. I feel like it's really true. Everybody has a story in them. And then. And then what's also, what's definitely true is that there are a lot of people who are just good writers and have a lot to say and don't have venues to express what they want. So substack is like a godsend. And what I'm doing is just within the sort of lit stack corner is just trying to organize, curate space a little bit in a way just make people. Yeah.

[Paul Starabin]

The last thing I got a note on, I think I've subscribed to it actually was you're doing something with advancing like novels or first chapters of novels.

[Sam Khan]

So yeah, this is what I said about addiction. So you just started a new substack, which is there's a real challenge within substack about getting people to read fiction. Reading long form fiction, they just basically won't do it. And. And so what I would do is I would post stuff on my substack, I'd post short stories and the engagement rates would always be way below these like hot takes on Trump. Even though the stories were what I really cared about and put all this work into and blah, blah, blah. And so. So what I was trying to do is just have. Have a designated spot for like, for long form writing. So I've just. I've been writing a lot. I've been writing novels at a prodigious clip recently. And so this is kind of a place to just to share my writing. And I've been doing it in a serialized way. It's called cult classic, by the way.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, yeah, no, I saw that. Well, I read and recommend. Your essay was from Printed on March, published on March 9 in Castilia, called what has Gone Wrong with Fiction in Our Era? A Laundry List. And, yeah, I mean, we can go over the list, but I'm curious what. Really. Well, tell me just briefly what you're saying in the piece, but also I'm kind of curious what kind of pushback, if any, you've received.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, so what I'm saying in the piece, to me, seems just very obvious, which is that fiction is not in a healthy place in this society, and it's not at the center of the discourse. And in a way that, for example, like, Hollywood movies are. Everybody's probably Seen Sinners or One Battle After Another. If I go to a coffee shop, I'll play this game with myself sometimes. Or if I'm sitting in a coffee shop and I kind of hear people around me talking, talk for, like, half an hour about what's going on in their lives, and they'll catch up, and then there will be a point when they're like, oh, you know, are you watching this? Are you watching this? And then that's when the conversation, like, really takes off, because they're doing that. And. And what that means is that there's just a centrality to. Especially to tv, but also to certain Hollywood movies. And that's kind of where that is in the culture. Fiction, serious novelistic fiction doesn't have that. It did a little bit. I have a memory of it in my lifetime. I suspect you have memories in your lifetime of fiction being at a much more central place. I mean, I would say if we were talking about, like, a real peak, I would say that there was kind of a mass. Kind of the era of, like, the mass market books. Like what, Dal Ballantyne. Whereas, like your catch 22, Slaughterhouse 5, Gravity's Rainbow, which is a very difficult book. Like, I mean, these books would come out and there would be a currency to them. Like, if you're an undergraduate, you're supposed to read them, you're supposed to have arguments about them. People know who Slothrop is, they know who Yossarian is. A certain generation would. I was sort of playing this game in the article. I don't think there's a single character, apart from Harry Potter, who. Which is already getting kind of old, who, like, the culture can Identify. Certainly not from literary fiction. There's no character that has that sort of point of commonality. So the main thesis, which I think is very hard to argue with, even though some people are arguing with it, is that fiction, it's basically lost its market share. It's lost its centrality within the public.

[Paul Starabin]

And this is a lament.

[Sam Khan]

It's a. It's a fact. Yeah, it's also a. I mean, I'm a partisan of fiction. I love it. I think it's. I think it's more interesting than anything else good fiction is. I prefer writing fiction to any other type of writing I worked in, like TV and film for a while. I prefer writing fiction to doing that. I would like to writers to be paid to make a reasonable amount of money when they do good work, which they don't. I mean, I think it's. I think it's like dark times for fiction and it's. It's getting worse because of all the usual stuff social media, AI, younger people seem to. It seems like we're moving.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. Phones and all that stuff. Is it just.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, I think. I think there's something really kind of dark around the bend, which is that we are kind of moving into like a post literacy era. I think the way young people communicate is much more through. I mean, it's through visual stuff. It's through video online, and you lose print and you lose certain complexities of your mind with that. You lose the ability to develop interiority, to really have continuity with the past in these kind of interesting ways. So, yes, it's a lamentation, I think.

[Paul Starabin]

I mean, you say that fiction has lost its ambition, which is a line that I spent a little bit of time reflecting on and thinking about. When did fiction have its ambition? I would probably draw the story, take it back some time. I mean, if we went into the 19th century and I became sort of obsessed with 19th century novels in my early 20s and then continuing even to my 30s. So I think of a really ambitious fiction novel as something like Bleak House. And for me, everything about it, just the fog everywhere, how it begins, and just this masterful description of London at a certain time and kind of age of empire and just all of the social pathologies that Dickens associated with that and how he was able to illustrate that through his characters and through this interminable John Dice vs John Dice legal case. And for me, even now, I mean, I read it decades ago. It kind of defines in a way what I thought about that era in a kind of different, maybe less obvious Way something like Sons and Lovers by D.H. lawrence, which, you know, is centrally concerned with sort of the trials of the heart of Paul, the main character, Paul Morel and his mother and his lovers, but really is also this kind of portrait of a certain time and place in the coal country in northern England and brings home a lot about, you know, how that society and culture worked and we could go on. And then I was trying to think, you know, is there an exception or counter thesis to what you're saying? And the best I've been able to come up with maybe is Barbara Kingsolver in a book like Demon Copperhead, which is of course taking off from David Copperfield by Dickens. But I really liked the book, it was also a bestseller. And I wonder, you know, and it felt to me pretty ambitious as well. I mean, in its kind of sketch of the opioid epidemic and its consequences in rural Appalachia. So. Yeah, what do you think?

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, so I do want to be clear. One thing I'm. What I'm not saying is that writers have kind of gone away. Like there are lots and lots of ambitious writers. There are lots of writers who I think are doing great work, who I've probably never heard of and want the. What I'm trying to keep the discourse in as much as possible is the sort of structural stuff and, and most of it is things people, nothing can really do anything about that. It's just like, you know, different forms sort of hit their maturity at different points in time. And then, and then there is a certain technological determinism. Once television comes out and television gets good, then that kind of golden age of reading starts to go, if we accept that premise starts to go away once social media comes out. I mean, these things do have a logic of their own. Like we do need to kind of recognize that. So literary fiction, which is. Which is built around boredom, like in order for something like Dickens to really have the mass appeal that it had, people had to be sitting around board waiting for Dickens stories to show up without, without anything else. If you don't have that, it's very hard to get the same conditions for your imagination to be working again. So that's nobody's fault, that's just a fact. But there are some things that I get a little bit worked up about. So there's some stuff that's downstream of there. I think the publishing industry, they were just trying to make money as much as they could. So they were trying to kind of follow along with some of these technological shifts and they would do Things like basically turn books into sort of first drafts for screenplays is what the industry was for a long time now. For a while they've been doing this thing where just the books get smaller and smaller because attention spans are getting shorter. They don't put out a lot of long stuff. They're following what's there. But I think the issue is that our literary fiction and the marketplace don't really go together. They're just two different kinds of creatures. So, so, so if everything in, if, if all of the gatekeepers, all of the tastemakers in fiction are people who are just trying to make money for themselves in their shrinking market, they're, they're really not thinking about the artistry. So, so I think there are all kinds of disincentives within the publishing industry. And then that has its own downstream effects, which is that writers are trying to figure out how to get in. And so they kind of follow along with whatever the comps are, whatever they think is going on in the industry, and they write for that. And what they write just gets schlockier and more dishonest and worse and worse. So like, I had this experience recently where I was trying to start a review publication and so I had to read a bunch of contemporary novels and it really just wasn't very pleasant. Like, I mean, they were just, it was just not good. And there's, there's a, a level of, kind of baked in societal dishonesty that was getting into the authorial voices. So, so I think there are a lot of people out there who are interesting. I would like to find my own kind of review ecosystem to, to sort of properly celebrate those people because they're not necessarily the people getting big advances from the publishing companies. So to me, the whole thing is just completely crazy. And I think what we sort of have to do is we have to step back, think about what we really want from this whole enterprise and then I think be a lot more intelligent in terms of understanding how the structures work of like why one book is coming to us in a, in the, on the display case of bookstores.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, well, the creative writing programs, I mean, are they part of this as well? I mean, how do they fit into this ecosystem? Because they're not new, of course, but at this point we're probably talking at least for most of them, probably at least a half a century or so or more. So this is not really a new thing.

[Sam Khan]

Right. So when I have these arguments on substack, what that's kind of the first target people go after they.

[Paul Starabin]

It's almost too easy in a way, but we have to address it.

[Sam Khan]

Right. They say this is the incubation. And if the work that's coming out of the incubation isn't very good and kind of all feels the same, increasingly is going through this whole politicized thing, then maybe if we kind of fix the incubation, that'll change it. But the whole thing is a little bit more complicated that. Because it's like, you know, I can't blame the programs for what they're doing. It was. I mean, what the programs were is a bunch of like New York beatniks who were getting priced out of their bohemian existence in New York. And so they hit on this bright idea of like, well, you know, maybe we can hook on with these universities and they'll pay us and then we can have sort of writing things. So. So I.

[Paul Starabin]

The writer. The writer in residence. And then, you know, yeah, they just.

[Sam Khan]

They just needed to buy hook or by crook. They needed to make a living for themselves. And then they. And then, and then that. And then that's actually the only way that anybody ever gets basically paid to write or to do anything with writing is that they get these years when they're doing their mfa and then they. And then they go through this whole.

[Paul Starabin]

They're often young too. Right? I mean, I haven't, you know, I'd have to see if there's statistics in that. But I mean, isn't one of your critiques, I think, or just a common critique, is it. It's almost like people start writing when they're. They haven't had a lot of lived experience. I mean, if so if you're sort of, you know, writing, what you know is the adage is, you know, how much do you really know?

[Sam Khan]

Right, right. And that. That's a whole big thing. So I was talking about this a lot recently, that the schools, they really got. They got super woke. And there, there's kind of a moment right around 2015 when it just happened. And there had always been a degree of ideological conformity within them, but it had more to do with what was happening with the programs. And then there's just something happened that was reflective of the broader culture and they became. Everybody started writing the same kind of political points. They became extremely intolerant for anything that was outside of that. And, and you can see it. I mean, you can just see it all the way through the publishing industry.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, yeah, I mean, let's break that down, actually, because the way it works is, you know, you need to get an agent. That's typically if you want to land a deal with a publishing house, so are the agents. I mean, I've dealt a lot. Well, I have a nonfiction agent, so I sort of know how all that works with the books I've written. But in fiction it's maybe more specialized. I mean, with agents as sort of gatekeepers perhaps in a larger way. Do you see that too?

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, I mean, everybody has their own kind of compromises within the system. I guess my whole thing is there's basically nobody at any point in the system who's just thinking about like, what are we really trying to do with the art here? How can we be as kind of bold and interesting and risk taking with our art? Everybody's kind of at their spot responding to whatever their market pressures are. I mean the publishers, they obviously have to move volume. The, the agents are supposed to be kind of downstream of the publishers, but in point of fact, the agents have accrued all this power. So they, so they become, they become the gatekeepers. But they're entirely concerned with getting their, you know, 15%. So they're just, so, they're just trying to maneuver within the publishing industry as much as they can. Like their, their job is not to think about craft really. Although I'm sure some of them do. And then, and then the MFAs are, they're in this sort of weird spot where they're hooked in with the universities. So, so they're, I don't know if they're curtailed exactly, but it's like they're just kind of breathing the faculty lounge atmosphere. And, and then a lot of their power comes from the professors being able to sort of whisper to, to agents like, oh, you should sign this person, not that person. And so from everything I can tell, the atmosphere in the MFAs is just not great. It's like, you know, sure, people can write a bit, but, but they tend to be, in order to get into one, you have to be the kind of person who like does applications. You're, I mean, it's just kind of rewards for people who are students basically and, and not for people who are, you know, want to write very freely. And then, and once you're there, I think you do have to tow some lines. There's just a lot of stuff and kind of managing student politics and managing the relationship between the faculty and the industry. I don't, I don't think the MFA is like the worst of the problem. They're, they, they're trying to Fill some kind of a hole in the system as best as they can. It's not really their fault that they've gained more power than they probably should. But, I mean, I'm. I'm out. I'm so outside of a lot of this stuff that for me, it's. For one thing, I can articulate this stuff in a very blue skies kind of way of like, what. What should it be? But then I'm also really trying to. It's not working so well, but I'm really trying to figure out how to get fiction to work with this online space that is more inherently democratic, that has less overhead. And so I. So I would. I would love to. I would love to get rid of some of these. These sort of weird industrial chains that are arts bureaucratic chains that don't really have to do with making good writing.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, I mean, I suppose a counterargument to all of this and sort of from the largest perspective is that, you know, as sad as it seems with the people not reading, we are, you know, in terms of the culture, you know, if you look at shows, let's say, like on hbo, like Succession or, you know, White Lotus, things like that, those are, in a way, you know, kind of like the big ambitious novels that were once written. They give us a kind of window of a culture. If they're really well done, they draw you into the story, but they also kind of articulate larger themes. I mean, I always get onto this stuff pretty late, but I began watching White Lotus on a trip to Italy with my wife and kind of got sucked in. And I thought, well, this is actually kind of pretty good. I was watching the one where. I think it was in Thailand, and it sort of raised these themes of social alienation, all this kind of stuff. Also the first one in Hawaii, and it struck me as in some way kind of novelistic. And maybe that couldn't be said of a lot of the other stuff that we're seeing out there and Netflix and so forth. But do you agree? I mean, is there some way in which that kind of cultural bigness is. Is coming through on stuff that, you know, people are consuming? I mean, these are pop. These are popular things.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah. So I totally agree. I mean, yeah, I think things like the Wire, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, for that matter.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, Game of Thrones didn't take with

[Sam Khan]

me for some reason, but yeah, it's very good. I mean, it's a little more. Slightly more genre. But let's say why are Mad Men just to kind of Be safe. Yeah.

[Paul Starabin]

And let's come back to genre, actually, because that's a term that kind of bugs me. But. But yeah, yeah. Mad Men too as well.

[Sam Khan]

So, so that's, that is a great work of art. That. Is that it. That probably is the, the great American novel, actually, if you want to.

[Paul Starabin]

Mad Men.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, sure.

[Paul Starabin]

Why do you say that?

[Sam Khan]

It's amazing. Like, I mean, it's just. I mean, it's like perfect the way. And it's, it's deep and the way. Right. I think you put it as well, like the way you're following the characters is totally novelistic. The psychological complexity is. I mean, people kept carrying, comparing like the Wire to Dickens or especially Dreiser. And the psychological complexity is much greater in the Wire than it is in Dickens or Dreiser. So we should, we shouldn't. We shouldn't.

[Paul Starabin]

I might challenge you on that, but we don't have to go into that.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, but we, we shouldn't get distract. Too distracted by like, by kind of the form that something is taking. Like things. These things are.

[Paul Starabin]

Right. But it has a lot of implications. I mean, you know, like.

[Sam Khan]

Let me just make my point. Sure, sure. So these are, you know, they're written by writers. These are professionals. They're getting well paid. You know, everything, everything about this is great. The, these are the works that.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, that was what I was going to say, actually, but. Okay.

[Sam Khan]

And so it's all to the good. But they're really expensive to make. They're really hard to make. They're. I mean, this was dependent. All of these basically were dependent on HBO and then a few knockoffs of HBO in a very narrow window where it made sense for them. If you're trying to be an artist, you're hoping that, that you move through the jungle of Hollywood in order to get your own show with complete creative freedom. I mean, it's like winning the lottery. It's really.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah.

[Sam Khan]

And. And most of the people I know, I mean, one thing that's happening is that a lot of the talented writers, the smart thing to do is you go to Hollywood, you become a kind of a screenwriter. But people I know, there are a lot of people I know who they've. They've actually made, Made a living doing this, but they've never made anything like they just get their stuff kind of optioned and then it just dies.

[Paul Starabin]

Yes, of course, you write a novel, it gets optioned, it gets made, and then somebody gives you a little bit of a title, but you basically have zero input into the Process. Yeah.

[Sam Khan]

And so this is what. This is a whole separate thing. Like, probably the most talented writers I'm aware of, the ones who, you know, people who are like my cohort, and they just sort of hit early and what tended to happen was that they would. They would do like a play, and play would get picked up and then Hollywood would come calling, and then that's like the last you ever hear of them, essentially, is because, you know, they get some money thrown at them and. And then they sort of get buried somewhere in Hollywood and they never end up.

[Paul Starabin]

Right.

[Sam Khan]

And they never end up having their own work produced. Maybe one will every so often, and then. And then they become a big deal and they produce these kind of great works. But. But it's. It's very rare. So. So from my perspective, it's mostly a way of just kind of suctioning off talent and having people die on the vine. What's nice about literary fiction and why I'm. Part of. Why I'm really partisan to it, is that whatever else you say about it, you have creative control. Like, that's. That. That's you writing. And so to me, it's just a very. It's a very pure form. It's very pure art. It needs. And it needs. It needs to exist. TV and film is. It's not really competition to that, but just the way it works is that it's kind of swallowed up a lot of literary fiction's role in the market.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, I guess it has. I mean, literary fiction, even these terms like literary fiction, where did that come from? I mean, this whole genre thing is something. I mean, here's where I should. I mean, my cards on the table is I'm a journalist for essentially all of my professional life. I've. Foreign correspondent, all kinds. I've been a reader. And I've loved novels since, I think, Crime and Punishment in Teenage years and Slaughterhouse 5 and stuff like that. And it's just. I just kind of always seem to be reading something and lately have dabbled a little bit, sort of like sticking the toe into the sort of the fiction area. And that's made me grapple with some of these things that I hadn't really thought about. For example, genre. It's like. I mean, do you have to have an answer to the question of what genre you're writing for? And where did that even come from? I mean, as I know, it's sort of like romance novels, mysteries, thrillers, this or that, but is that just sort of the logical sort of outcome? If A kind of consumer capitalist marketplace for literary product that we have to have it broken down. And also with Amazon now sort of gets into the equation of everything being so many things being self published that are more and more dictated by sort supposedly what the market wants.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, yeah. I think it's. I think it's like the, the book stalkers at Barnes and Noble basically determining everything else and then, and then the writers try to figure out like what this means. But. Right. I mean, it's all just ways of, of moving product is like, you know what, how do you classify novel? This. Right. This literary fiction term showed up at some point and, and, and then that's getting kind of squeezed further and further. Yeah, I mean, so, so there are definitely two different ways of thinking about this stuff. There's. There's ways of thinking about sort of the, the structural reasons for why everything is bad, and we can spend a long time on that. And then there are the ways of thinking about what you want to do, which is sometimes just not caring about anything else and sometimes is working a little bit with the cards you've been dealt. So I mean, something that that's going on for me is that I'm very partial to this idea that a good writer should be able to write anything. That it's. That what writing is really about is it's a kind of psychological maturity. It's a kind of digging through to really opening up your subconscious and just finding like, just opening it up wide, getting past the person who appears in social situations and getting to something that's much, much bigger and much deeper. And part of that is just being able to write anything.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, is that about making yourself uncomfortable with what you're writing? Because I know when people begin on fiction writing, it's often said whatever you think you're writing about, in some way, you're writing about yourself or your life or experiences you've encountered. And in order for it to be interesting, you're probably going to have to confront stuff that you may not really want to talk about.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, I think it's just a huge thing. I mean, the way I've come to think about it is start using this very kind of religious language for it, which is thinking about basically what a human soul is. And when I use this word, I mean something kind of particular. I mean that it's basically your inner life, that it's sort of all of the. The entirety of basically the impressions that you have. And if you think about the way that your memories form these different imprints on you, the way that things you've never personally encountered, but that you know of your relationship to history or politics or whatever, that. That forms an impression in its own way, all of your emotions. And so there's this huge churning space inside of everybody. And to me, fiction is, and I guess art in general is just this incredible tool for being able to do that, that it's a little bit extracted from your social role where you have to kind of narrow yourself and be the kind of presentable version of yourself. And it allows you in this kind of. It allows you in the safe but uncomfortable way to go and just explore everything. You know, touch all demons, touch all the different parts of yourself. And so for me, that's. I mean, you can't do this in one lifetime. Like you take. There are just so many stories, so many things that you want to touch on. So. So what I try to do in my writing is I try to be very different with, with everything I write. Like, genre is kind of an interesting topic because there's something very, I mean, I think you mean something slightly different. But there's also this idea of like genre fiction, which is a very American kind of thing, is something that's really taken over the market in a lot of ways. Game of Thrones is technically genre, but it's bigger than anything else, sci fi, whatever. And I've been, and I think a lot of writers have been really good about noticing what's valuable in that and then trying to kind of marry that with literary, more like literary fiction. And that's something that, that I've been working on. That makes sense to me.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, I mean, I find that genre is, I mean, for example, I've gone through, you know, I think editor and publisher of the website has this long list of literary journals and they tell you exactly what they're interested in. And it often just seems pretty narrowly defined. You know, it could be some kind of science fiction. It could have lots of stuff having to do with, you know, issues of sex and gender, you know, so called, you know, marginalized people. I mean, there's just, you know, you could say a lot of it's politically correct, but that's really not even my point. It's more that it. It can seem very narrow. It's like, okay, here's a literary journal and here is very specifically kind of exactly what they're interested in. And there's a kind of an assumption behind that which is not stated, which is that the fiction in some ways should be directed within certain boundaries. It should occupy kind of a certain territory that's already been defined. And then you start to think, well, as a writer, am I supposed to be addressing things on those terms rather than maybe what just might come more naturally? So I've wondered if that's also part of the issue here with. You know, we haven't talked about that. But literary journals, maybe they're, you know, they're part of this ecosystem as. As well, which I guess. And I, you know, and I like that you're doing this. You're trying to get around some of the stuff with. It sounds like with what you're doing at, you know, at substack, you know, in terms of giving some scope to, you know, people whose voices you think should be out there.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, I mean, I just have these tools which are basically the tools of the Internet that can. That can essentially reduce overhead, improve kind of democratic reach. And I mean, the literary journals, they're all in these sort of difficult spots because of basically where their funding is. So they get. They. They just get. And what the constraints of what they're doing is. So they just get very penned in. And then as the whole. As the ship is sinking, they get kind of.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, you look them up and you. They. They. They have to say, well, you know, okay, they don't pay for the pieces. All right, all right. But then they. It like how, you know, how many readers do they have? And it seems like most of them have maybe a few thousand. That would be like, not a bad, you know, statistic for them.

[Sam Khan]

It's a. It's a joke. The. The whole thing is. And. And then they get very. Right, It's. It's hard to get into them. You don't get anything out of it. Once you do it, you get a certain amount of prestige. But they. They are sitting in this place kind of within the prestige economy that's a little bit hard to dislodge them from. And they get. Yeah, they just get more narrow, and they get narrower and narrower. You never want to read what they're doing. So, I mean, you can never underestimate the power of freedom. Just people being able. Free to write how they want to write on substack is a huge thing that outweighs so much else. But yeah, there is something that I don't quite understand within kind of literary form where readers seem to have, like, turned on realism at some point. And I mean, people read a lot. Well, there are people out there who read a lot, and they seem to be. Do it within, like, fantasy. There are a lot of young people who are reading, but they kind of only want to read, like fantasy. They only want to read genre. And so the publishers are very responsive to that. So why, I don't quite get it, why the sort of appetite for realism went away. Because, I mean, realism isn't just kitchen sinks. It's also, I mean, it's mostly. It's mostly just about people.

[Paul Starabin]

Although I would give you respond to the Barbara Kingsolver. I mean, she's been writing bestsellers. You know, Demon Copperhead was a bestseller. I mean, I think her novels are very much kind of entrenched in realism.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, right. I mean, this is where it gets tricky when we get into these sort of. When I'm generalizing, I'm not trying to make a blanket statement. I'm not trying to say there's no this, but I'm just trying to find the trends. And what I'm really trying to do is I'm really trying to identify kind of the structural stuff. And once you have once the structural stuff, which sometimes has to do with technology and sometimes has to do with sort of psychology is there, then you can. Then everybody else tends to sort of things take the shape of their head.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, no, I'm largely with you. I mean, the tagline for this podcast is Making sense of an Age of Upheaval. And I think one reason I wanted to have this conversation was because I think that literature can help make sense of an age of upheaval. I mean, here we are, we're talking, it's almost the beginning of April. There's a reasonably good chance the United States is going to be finding itself in an escalated conflict in the Middle east with Iran with all kinds of global consequences. There's a lot of anxiety. I mean, we're also in the age of Trump, whatever that means. Exactly. So you would think that this is a time where fiction could respond in a very ambitious way and in a very intelligent way. And I've mentioned my kind of one exception, but I don't, you know, I'm not seeing a whole lot else. I, you know, open up my. Dutifully open up my print copy of the New York Times, you know, the Sunday Book Review, and there's a lot of fiction in there always, but it just, it can feel really small to me. And I just ask, as a sort of citizen and member of the Republic of Letters, where is the book? It might happen on the nonfiction level, maybe, but where is the big book in fiction that's going to speak to the times in which we're living.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Right. Where's the intensity? That's kind of the big thing. Yeah. I mean, so for me, I feel like my bearings on this, that I was growing up at the end of the 20th century. There was a.

[Paul Starabin]

For you. When were you born?

[Sam Khan]

In 85. So. So he's born. Was born in. This is a really optimistic first term

[Paul Starabin]

of Reagan or second term.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, but I mean, I don't remember Reagan. But. But I definitely.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, you wouldn't. But. Yeah, but.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah. So my kind of cultural bearings were that their fiction in the 20th century had occupied sort of an extraordinary position. And so on the one hand, you have what the modernists were doing, where these big Musil. Duprus, these kind of mon. These kind of big books that were really just trying to make sense of everything, these sort of massive texts. And so that's appealing in one way, and then the other thing that's appealing is sort of legacy of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where, I mean, the conditions for writing are much, much worse than they are here. But there were all these people who just did it and.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, that's always been the case, I think in repressive societies is sometimes the most. The works of imagination that come out, like Dr. Zhivago and any number of others, are the most interesting. It's sort of a. There's a dynamic there to that.

[Sam Khan]

Well, not, not always. Sometimes the repression just wins. But, but, but, but there's. But in that case, I mean, there's this extraordinary literature that emerged out of it. So people writing knowing that the stuff they wrote might never see the light of day, that they might die for it, as a lot of them did, and they would just do it, and they. And they wrote really interesting stuff. A lot of it's very political, not necessarily didactic. They're dealing with what we might even call genre. Master Margarita, maybe you call it kind of a genre book in a sense. Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, there's fantasy, there's surrealism, and so it's kind. So I sort of look around and I kind of want to shake everybody in this sort of like, you know, why. Why can't we have that sort of intensity? I mean, these people, what Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, what these guys are doing, and they write these big books, and if the. They know that they're not going to be published and they stick them in a drawer or they maybe they find a small group of readers and they just had that level of intensity and passion about it. And that's what I want to see. I mean, even as much as I like Substack, I mean, most of it is basically like BS discourse, just kind of like people are talking about whatever the thing is, Lindy west or this thing right now, something or other about Sabrina Carpenter a little while ago. Like, that's what most of it is. So what I really want is I want people to live in a way that they can be proud of. I want ideas like honor to come back. I don't want people to live these lives that are sort of optimized or for the market, which is how almost everybody is living, which I get. You have to do that to some extent. But I think if. If you're. And at a minimum, for anybody who's kind of following the path of creativity and writing, that's what you should be choosing for. You should be choosing pride. You should be choosing just trying to say what you really want to say out of it, because you're not going to make any money, any real money anyway. So it's like just. Just do. Do the thing.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. I mean, we've seen also, I mean, this whole age of war. I mean, we saw the Naked and the Dead mailer come out of the, you know, the Second World War. We saw catch 22. But. But. And I think Joseph Heller began when he was, like, in advertising or something like that, when he, you know, he embarked on this novel. But I don't know that we've seen the great novel that's embedded in the 2003 Iraq war, for example. And so I kind of look for that as well. And that could be a consequence of the. I'm reluctant to go press too hard on the woke explanation for everything, but it could be that the war novel might be seen as kind of retrograde.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, right. I mean, I was working on a film, like a documentary film about veterans, and there was a point when we were sort of trying to take it to market, and. And everybody just said, there's no market for this. Nobody's interested in veterans. So we. We literally changed the name from veteran to something that emphasized, like, the love story between, you know, the guy and his wife.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, and I mean, not to stereotype, but are, like, you know, 75% of the readers now female as opposed to male? And that might have something to do with how tastes are formed in the novel market.

[Sam Khan]

Right. I mean, the important. It's. I think it's important to never grab kind of one data point.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Khan]

Just all These things are flowing into each other. Yeah, I agree with you that it's not, it's not like woke is the explanation for everything. It's like woke is kind of downstream of something. It's downstream of, of the literary industry feeling like it's in this very narrow, embattled place. They're not making a lot of money. They feel like they squeeze what they can. And they started to get scared at one level when Wilk was coming and wanted to make sure that they were, you know, they weren't, they weren't going to themselves get canceled. And then at another level, I think they recognized that it was sort of good for business that they were, they were able to sort of promote a bunch of people. I mean, at the time we were all sort of like, well, you know, maybe this is true. Maybe we just need to change the demographics and the work will get better. But it didn't really happen. And, and then, and then probably the more important dimension to it is just kind of, you know, what's, what's going on with sort of the, the market and the structures of it. And, and they every. I mean, there's this whole thing that if you notice like the popular books, they're getting shorter and shorter the pages, there's more and more blank space on the pages. Just know that attention span is diminished. So if somebody writes a, a great big book, if somebody tries to write the Naked and the Dead, it's just, it's not going to do very well. Like, they know that. And so writers don't really bother. Some of them do. It ends up in a drawer and the publishers just aren't going to put it out. Like the moment when Mailer hit, I mean, I think it had to do with something real, which was that the, the forces of the mid part of the 20th century, they compelled people to deal with reality in a certain way, to deal with politics.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, well, Salbello kind of had grappled with Chicago and the Great Depression and you know, it's just.

[Sam Khan]

But I mean, it's the war and the Holocaust, like in all of it came very close to people's lives. And, and now if you're a literary reader, you're able to sort of believe that this stuff is kind of far removed from you. So all the stuff that's kind of hot tends to be these like 20 somethings wandering around New York City and it's, you're complaining about being that. So it's like, so the whole thing is misaligned and we want to try to get out of that.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. And also, yeah, we should be winding up soon. But I can't help. I mean, I read your sort of face slap of the New Yorker, which was. I'm sure you. You must have gotten pushed back to that because I was. I mean, I was talking about it with some. Some friends of mine who are, you know, really down, you know, hardcore New Yorker people, which I have to admit, I'm not. I mean, it began, you know, it was my mother's favorite magazine, of course, you know, the cartoons and all that sort of stuff and fantastic reportage. I don't know that I've ever read or finished a short story that's been published in the New Yorker. But in relation to this, I don't want to do a whole thing about the New Yorker. But in terms of the sort of fiction, what we're talking about, a lot of New Yorker stories just feel really small. And it's like, well, why I'd rather spend my time. They do do some fantastic foreign correspondent type pieces, and if it's related to an area of my interest, or almost any area, but like Russia, for example, yeah, sure, I'm going to read that some guy has probably spent some considerable amount of time on the ground talking to people and so forth, and they've put together a pretty good read on it. But in this kind of fiction component, you would think if the New Yorker isn't kind of doing this kind of ambitious stuff, and it's a pretty commercial magazine, I mean, they charge a fair amount for a subscription. Then who will.

[Sam Khan]

Or who is the New Yorker documentary, their centennial celebration?

[Paul Starabin]

I didn't. I didn't watch it.

[Sam Khan]

Well, it's very. It's unintentionally very revealing. So, I mean, there are a few things that come across. And basically what it is, is it's just. I mean, this thing's been around for a hundred years. It's just entrenched in its ways. And so that has all this organizational inertia.

[Paul Starabin]

It's very regardful of itself.

[Sam Khan]

Yeah. And so I know we're getting to the end, but I'll just give you a couple moments from. From this. So. So this. So they're having a pitch meeting for the fiction editors, and one editor says to the other is like, no, I'm kind of on the fence about this one. And the other editor's like, yeah, well, it's kind of like 10 other stories that are exactly like it. And the other one is like, yeah, but I'm on the fence for pushing it in. And so like they know it themselves. But what's going on is that they're, they're within, they're within a very narrow band. I mean, look, for one thing, there are two of them, but it's not really an excuse. And they're getting the agents. There's kind of an order that they're supposed to put people in. There's a small number of established writers. They have the grants, they have the agents. The agents are coming to them saying like, hey, you know, you haven't published Joseph o' Neill in a while. And then they get the Joseph o' Neill story. He's lost his magic. And they're kind of like, well, you know, I guess we haven't had a guy in a bit. We haven't had him. Okay, fine. And you can just, you can feel, if you read it attentively, which I've been doing, you can feel that. And then they, they literally just say that in the movie. The other one is really embarrassing, actually is. So the, the whole story with the New Yorkers that it started as kind of a dilettantes magazine in the 20s. It was out of the Algonquin Roundtable and in the 30s they got.

[Paul Starabin]

But it had a real sense of humor about things.

[Sam Khan]

What's interesting is that it wasn't, it wasn't good in the beginning. Everybody knew it wasn't good and it got, it got through. And the reason it got through was because they had a new generation of writers in the 30s. But it's true, they did have, they did have something of the tone going. But then AJ Liebling, they had Joseph Mitchell and then worked John Hersey and, and these guys, I think actually a lot of them were kind of making it up, but they were basically going into kind of seeing how the other half lives and they were doing these pretty pieces and that. And that's really rated this kind of non fiction style of reportage. They're famous. They just, they just don't do that. It's. And the people in the movie were talked. Some of them were self aware. Andrew Morantz was pretty self aware talking about this. But then Nick Paumgarden I think is his name. He's supposed to do like a talk of the town to like wander off and talk to people on the street. And the camera crew's following along and it's embarrassing. He's trying to talk to guys who are like doing food carts and he doesn't know how to talk to them. They don't want to talk to him. Nah. Da. And then eventually he gets to a woman who. Who's already a New Yorker reader. You can just tell she looks like some, like, Greenwich, Connecticut, matron, and they have a good conversation. So. So a lot of what. So some of this stuff is about class, and there's this kind of professional class. It's just. And I'm.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's happened with journalism as well. I've written about this, too. I think there should be, like, you know, term limits for, you know, Washington journalists, that kind of thing. Like send them to Kansas or someplace. Yeah.

[Sam Khan]

But of course, it's never going to happen because these people hold on to their job.

[Paul Starabin]

Of course it's never going to happen. Some of them become foreign correspondents, which I think is a good thing, but basically they're not going to go back to, you know, Iowa.

[Sam Khan]

Well, yeah. Or. Or the newspapers fold and then. And then substitute.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, I mean. Right. Yeah. But. Yeah. So the New Yorker. Yeah, I'm sorry. You can. Do you want to close on that point?

[Sam Khan]

Yeah, it's just. To me, it's just symptomatic of a certain rot that's gone with kind of the professional class. And so, I mean, it's something that maybe not totally intentionally, but has happened in my life is that. I mean, I feel like I really tried to kind of rejuvenate myself in a way that I've, you know, I mean, moving on to one thing, but. But at a deeper level, it's. It's not. It's not keeping all of the same beliefs, attitudes that I. When I was 20. Let me just finish. That I had when I was 21 and looking for reinforcement for that. It's. It's a certain skepticism. It's allowing yourself to be, maybe to. To be led into places that are, you know, unusual ways of thinking. Question yourself. This is something that I've done that I'm very proud of, but it's not something that I could. I could have done in my documentary career. It's not something that I could have done if I'd been working for one of these magazines my whole life. So Fresh Blood is important, but Fresh Blood doesn't necessarily just mean new people. It also means just. Just rejuvenating yourself.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, no, I'm with you. I mean, I'm just venturing out myself into substack and so forth. So, yeah, to close on a positive note, I think you're showing that there are certainly a lot of alternatives out there. And I think if there's a demand I mean, if substack is maybe one example for people to go outside the so called legacy system, which is not a word that I like, but okay, I think we all know what I'm talking about then why not? And to become independent publishers, in a sense, it's just like taking down the whole casemaker, gate maker, gatekeeper type function. So in that sense, maybe the culture can bring us in a better way. So okay, I've kept you. I appreciate your insights. I think. Good. I think it's been fun and I hope, I'm sure listeners will enjoy. So yes, this is Paul Starabin signing off for America and beyond. And thank you, Sam Khan.

[Sam Khan]

My pleasure. The wrongs we must write, the fights we must win, the future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are marines. We were made for this.