The Karol Markowicz Show: Exploring the Intersection of Writing and Culture with Kat Rosenfield

Summary

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Episode: The Karol Markowicz Show: Exploring the Intersection of Writing and Culture with Kat Rosenfield
Release Date: July 25, 2025

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, host Carol Markowitz welcomes columnist and novelist Kat Rosenfield for an in-depth conversation about the convergence of writing, culture, and the challenges of navigating the modern literary landscape. Rosenfield, known for her sharp commentary in Free Press and her upcoming novel, How to Survive in the Woods, delves into the intricacies of her dual roles as a journalist and fiction writer.

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Balancing Journalism and Fiction Writing

Carol Markowitz opens the dialogue by highlighting the perceived differences between Rosenfield's work as a columnist and a fiction writer.

[03:35] Carol Markowitz: "Do you find that they're a completely different skill set, or are they kind of the same category to you?"

Kat Rosenfield responds by emphasizing the interconnectedness of both forms of writing:

[04:09] Kat Rosenfield: "I think of fiction writing and the journal and the culture writing that I do as approaching the same set of questions from different angles and in different ways. And so, to me, they inform each other."

Rosenfield explains that both disciplines allow her to explore and understand the world, though through different lenses, fostering a symbiotic relationship that enriches her overall perspective.

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Navigating Cancel Culture and Public Shaming

The conversation takes a deeper turn as Rosenfield recounts her personal experience with cancellation within the young adult (YA) fiction community.

[05:12] Kat Rosenfield: "We got rid of a lot of the traditional strictures and structures surrounding sex... and we dismantled something that was performing a function in society and we didn't replace it with anything."

Rosenfield discusses how the erosion of societal norms has led to challenges in redefining interpersonal expectations, particularly concerning sexuality. This framework sets the stage for her later experiences with cancel culture.

[08:26] Kat Rosenfield: "It took a few years... I realized that I had stumbled onto something that not only did I find interesting but that other people found interesting to read about."

Rosenfield details her 2017 viral piece for Vulture, The Toxic Drama of YA Twitter, which analyzed the dynamics fueling public shaming and censorship within online communities. She highlights how her personal setback as a canceled author propelled her investigative pursuits into broader societal trends.

[10:00] Carol Markowitz: "I remember this."

[10:01] Kat Rosenfield: "Yeah, yeah, that was 2017."

This segment underscores the early manifestations of cancel culture and its impact on individuals within specific literary circles before gaining broader societal recognition in the early 2020s.

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The Impact of Social Media on Public Discourse

Rosenfield reflects on the transformative role of social media in amplifying public shaming and altering community dynamics.

[12:06] Carol Markowitz: "They really did go after liberals more than anybody else because they were the easiest to take down because they already believed in a lot of it."

This observation suggests that pre-existing ideological alignments made certain groups more vulnerable to intensive public scrutiny and cancellation efforts.

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Transitioning from Public Relations to Writing

Rosenfield shares her career trajectory, contrasting her unsuccessful stint in public relations with her fulfillment in writing.

[12:50] Kat Rosenfield: "Publicity is about trying to... convince people that a bad thing is good and... trying to manipulate the narrative instead of uncovering the truth."

Her candid admission reveals her preference for truth-seeking journalism over the narrative control inherent in public relations, highlighting a pivotal shift towards her authentic career path.

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The Role of Beauty and Preservation in Society

Shifting to more philosophical musings, Rosenfield discusses her concern for preserving beauty in a world she perceives as increasingly destructive.

[19:54] Kat Rosenfield: "I really want to encourage people to rediscover... making the space around them beautiful... enjoy your food, smell the rose that you pass on your walk."

Rosenfield elaborates on the importance of embodied and sensory pleasures, advocating for a conscious effort to maintain and create beauty as a counterbalance to societal decay.

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Vandalism as a Symbol of Societal Discord

A poignant example Rosenfield shares involves the vandalism of peonies in Ann Arbor, symbolizing the clash between personal aesthetics and political causes.

[22:03] Kat Rosenfield: "They went into this botanical garden... and cut the heads off all of the peonies for Palestine."

Rosenfield condemns such acts as nihilistic and a breach of the social contract, questioning the true benefits of creating ugliness under the guise of supporting a cause.

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Personal Reflections and Advice

As the conversation winds down, Rosenfield offers heartfelt advice to her younger self and her listeners.

[23:46] Kat Rosenfield: "There are things that I might have wanted not to experience at that time in my life because they were painful. But... I don't think that I would tell her anything except keep doing what you're doing."

Encouraging resilience and authenticity, Rosenfield emphasizes the value of staying true to one's path despite challenges and setbacks.

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Closing Thoughts

Carol Markowitz concludes the interview by lauding Rosenfield's unique perspective and literary contributions.

[25:15] Carol Markowitz: "I love the way you cover topics and I love the perspective that you have."

Rosenfield leaves listeners with a final piece of advice centered on fostering beauty and normalcy in everyday life.

[25:36] Kat Rosenfield: "Make the space around you beautiful... enjoy your food, smell the rose... Be normal."

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Conclusion

This episode offers a compelling exploration of Kat Rosenfield's experiences and insights into writing, culture, and the complexities of modern societal interactions. From navigating cancel culture to advocating for the preservation of beauty, Rosenfield provides a nuanced perspective that resonates with both writers and readers seeking to understand the evolving landscape of contemporary discourse.

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Notable Quotes:

• Kat Rosenfield [04:09]: "I think of fiction writing and the journal and the culture writing that I do as approaching the same set of questions from different angles and in different ways."

• Kat Rosenfield [08:26]: "I realized that I had stumbled onto something that not only did I find interesting but that other people found interesting to read about."

• Kat Rosenfield [19:54]: "I really want to encourage people to rediscover... making the space around them beautiful... enjoy your food, smell the rose that you pass on your walk."

• Kat Rosenfield [25:36]: "Make the space around you beautiful... enjoy your food, smell the rose... Be normal."

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For more insights from Kat Rosenfield, explore her columns in Free Press and look forward to her upcoming novel, How to Survive in the Woods, releasing next spring.

Transcript

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[Carol Markowitz]

Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz show on iheartradio. My guest today is Kat Rosenfield, columnist and the Free Press and author of six novels, including the soon to be released how to Survive in the Woods. So nice to have you on, Katie.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Carol Markowitz]

So you write columns at Free Press, but you're also a fiction writer. And I find those two things to be very different from each other. Do you find that they're a completely different skill set? Like, I could not write fiction at all, and I can write columns like, standing on my head. So do you see a difference between them, or are they kind of the same category to you?

[Kat Rosenfield]

I mean, I want to say, like, don't sell yourself short. You may find someday that there's a novel inside of you. I think of fiction writing and the journal and the culture writing that I do as approaching the same set of questions from different angles and in different ways. And so, to me, they inform each other. I'm very interested in trying to describe what I'm seeing in the world and trying to understand the world. And I think that journalism and fiction offer two different ways, two different lenses through which to do that. But there's a lot of interplay there.

[Carol Markowitz]

I guess I could see that. I just feel like it's a completely different style of writing that I. I'm not selling myself short. I just know I can't do it. So I see my own brand as just be normal. And, you know, that's sort of where I feel like my writing comes from. And I see you very similarly, especially where the topics of sex and gender are concerned. Like, I think a lot of your columns are, like, just be normal about sex. Do you feel like that's true, or is there more?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, yeah, I know. I wouldn't say that I'm as prescriptive about it as that. I trot mostly to stay on the like is side of the is ought distinction. I'm not really interested in telling people how to live or what to do. But when it comes to things like sex, I do think that I frequently end up just pointing at something that is true and a little bit inconvenient, which is that we got rid of a lot of the traditional strictures and structures surrounding sex. And, you know, there were good reasons for doing that. And then maybe there were some not, not so good reasons for doing that. You know, I would say, like feminism, women's liberation, good reason for doing it. Just the urge to burn down everything old. Maybe not such a good reason. But the upshot of all of it, you know, whatever the original motivations were, is that we dismantled something that was a sort of a Chesterton's fence. It was performing a function in society and we didn't replace it with anything. And now we're sort of flailing around trying to reinvent new rules on the fly and we don't really know what to do and it's not going very well. So when it comes to things like sex, yeah, I think that we have gotten into this weird place where there's this expectation about how it's going to go, especially for people who are inexperienced and young and just sort of understanding their sexuality for the first time. That is not aligned at all with reality or how things work for most people.

[Carol Markowitz]

Interesting. I love telling people what to do. I don't understand at all not telling people what to do. I think that's also part of my brand. So how did you get into writing about this or how did you find this? Do you feel like this is your beat? I guess I should start with that.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Culture is my beat. Every time someone says, like, what exactly, exactly do you write about? I'll paraphrase and rather steal from Didion and say, I'm just writing to understand what I see and what it means. I am very interested in how we treat each other as people, who we are to each other. And increasingly I'm getting interested in sort of the moral questions of what we owe to each other. The word morality. I used to shy away from a lot more, but I'm rediscovering that it's useful when talking about, you know, interpersonal relationships or, you know, the state of the human race. And so how do I get into writing about this? The particular things that I write about now I actually really owe in large part to having been a young adult fiction writer at a time when a lot of the things that came into the cultural mainstream around, I want to say, 2019, 2020, that really broke forth in what we, what we think of as like the great Awokening, which I'm using my scare quotes. I was in the young adult fiction community as an author, and young adult fiction is where a lot of kind of wacky stuff that eventually broke out mainstream started to incubate early. And I saw it happening. I saw this very sensorial, censorious, very like angry and sort of weaponized social justice rhetoric starting to take effect. Everybody was like intently focused on politics as though they were a proxy for character. And I, I said something about this.

[Carol Markowitz]

Really foolishly, apparently immediately got canceled, basically. Yeah.

[Kat Rosenfield]

But you know, what happened there was as. I mean, personally, it's not fun to be canceled. It's one of the more excruciating experiences you can have as an adult. But journalistically, it was very interesting to me that this happened and I got very curious about the dynamics that fuel something like this, you know, that make people so afraid of somebody just observing things that are true in their community.

[Carol Markowitz]

Different from what they're observing. That's really the problem is that you had a perspective that they didn't share and that couldn't be allowed and that needed to be immediately put down. How did you get out of it? How did you recover?

[Kat Rosenfield]

It took a few years. But the thing that happened there where I did not write another young adult fiction novel, I haven't written one since. That was 2017. So that part of my life did effectively end because the community kind of ostracized me and made it difficult for me to be there, there. But the fact that it was journalistically interesting to me that that had happened made me want to investigate it more deeply. And I ended up writing about, not specifically my cancellation because I think that's kind of boring, but about the dynamics holistically that caused something like this to unfold into, you know, from. From a moment where dissent is considered intolerable into a full blown witch hunt. And I wrote about that for Vulture in this piece called the Toxic Drama of YA Twitter. And I wrot.

[Carol Markowitz]

I remember this.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, yeah, that was 2017. This book, the Black Witch, was sort of my case study for how one of these campaigns to destroy somebody who's considered to have, like, run afoul of the community's political pieties in some way. I did an examination of that. I talked to A bunch of people. And that piece just went wildly viral. And I realized at that point that I had stumbled onto something that not only did I find interesting, but that other people found interesting to read about.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, because I think 2017, it there, you know, it wasn't really a thing yet. I think 2000 and 20s, early 2000 and 20s is really where cancel culture got going. Maybe in the YA world that's where it was happening, like you said originally, but it wasn't a widespread thing yet. I wish I had the date, but when was the whole. I forgot the girl's name. But has blank landed yet? The thing that trended.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, Justine Seiko. Right.

[Carol Markowitz]

Has Justine landed yet?

[Kat Rosenfield]

I think that was 2013 or 2014. It was, it was earlier. It was early on. Yeah. You know, you had these sort of emergent dynamics, how we were treating each other on social media. People were starting to realize that it was an amazing tool for public shaming. And then in communities that had gotten very like politically orthodox, it was used as a method of not just shaming, but shunning, you know, ostracization, professional destruction.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, she got fired upon landing because she had made a joke about going to Africa and hoping she doesn't get aids. She wasn't like a public figure or anything. It wasn't like your congressman said this, it was just some lady on Twitter.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, I mean, even worse than that. It was a joke, actually, that was intended to be self deprecating and at her own expense. She was trying to make a joke about her own white privilege. And that was such an interesting example of how the people who end up getting just really bitten the hardest by this type of dynamic are the ones who subscribe to it already. You know, they're already trying to apologize for their privilege, privilege or whatever it is. And that makes them that much more susceptible to being destroyed by it.

[Carol Markowitz]

Absolutely. I've written about this a lot where there was only so much, for example, that this cancel culture thing could do to conservatives. Like, how are you going to cancel Ben Shapiro? Like, I don't like what you said. You know, cancel, it wouldn't matter. But they really did go after liberals more than anybody else because they were the easiest to take down because they already believed in a lot of it. Did you always want to be a writer?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Stumbled backwards into it? I always liked to write, but when I graduated from college, I needed to make a living and I didn't really understand writing as a thing that was remunerative in any way. I just had this image of Somebody like in a turret, in a tower, wearing fingerless gloves, like typing and starving. Sounds great.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes.

[Kat Rosenfield]

So I started out actually as a publicist and I have never been more terrible at a job in my life. Publicity, I think is in many ways the option of journalism, which I think of as a truth seeking enterprise.

[Carol Markowitz]

Funny.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Publicity is about trying to like tell people, you know, convince people that a bad thing is good and.

[Carol Markowitz]

Or just the story you want told.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Right.

[Carol Markowitz]

It doesn't have to be bad, but yes, you want them to tell the story your way.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yes, exactly. You're trying to manipulate the narrative instead of uncover the truth. And you know, journalism, I think is about uncovering the truth. Much more comfortable on the other side of things. I was such, such a terrible publicist. It's like indescribable.

[Carol Markowitz]

What was bad about it? Like, did you feel like it was hard to kind of cold call people? I also did PR in the early days of my employment, but I didn't, I didn't love calling people on the phone. But other than that.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, I mean that, that was the era of the cold call before everything went digital. And I did get yelled at on the phone by a few different people. What else was I bad at? Just, you know, the, that type of social interaction, having to hype something up. I found it really, really exhausting. And that was on top of office culture, which just generally was not a great fit for me. I have always been meant to be in the turret with the typewriter, as it turns out.

[Carol Markowitz]

I like that. Well, one of the people that yelled at me when I was in PR was Fred Dicker. He was a journalist in New York. He covered state politics and he was the scariest person to call. And now we're friends and he's been on the show. So life can come full circle. Yes, I love that.

[Kat Rosenfield]

I wish I could remember the names of somebody who yelled at me, but.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh, he was the scariest. So I'd never forget Fred Dicker for sure. We're gonna take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Markowitz Show. Ah, come on.

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[Carol Markowitz]

I think when I met you in New York, am I crazy or did you do yoga teaching?

[Kat Rosenfield]

I do. Yeah, I am.

[Carol Markowitz]

You do still?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, yeah. Less than I do. Less than I did, rather. I was prior to the pandemic teaching between 10 and 15 classes a week and now I'm, I'm down to two because it's. Takes a lot of time. I prefer to be writing. It's, you know, a better use of my time to be writing. And also as I go deeper into middle age, I find that making a living with my body is like. I make it sound like I'm actually a prostitute, but it's hard. It's, you know, it's grueling, it's exhausting.

[Carol Markowitz]

Making a living with my body. Yeah, I like that though. I like the way that sounds, even though it might be questionable to some people.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah.

[Carol Markowitz]

So you don't, you say you do still do it. But.

[Kat Rosenfield]

I find that it's interesting because yoga teaching is actually an example of what people originally meant to describe when the term emotional labor was coined, where it's, you're managing people's moods. It's in some sense is a service oriented position. And I really unironically love that about it.

[Carol Markowitz]

Really?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah. I love, you know, the, you know, being able to kind of hold the energy in a room. I sound very woo woo right now, but I get it though. Yeah. Yoga is my community. I love everybody who is there. The studio where I work is within walking distance of my house. So I feel like this is this very embodied, physical and other person focused thing that I do that allows me to keep a foot in the real world and to just be normal. Like you were saying, just being normal, which I do think is important. Even if it's not my ethos as a writer, it is kind of my ethos as a person. So.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. Yeah. And you give off this very calm, peaceful vibe. Thank you. I feel like you really radiate that for sure. What do you worry about switching to something completely negative?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Oh God. I worry about. This is a weird thing, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot. Trying to keep the space around me beautiful when I feel like it is. Trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. I wasn't expecting to talk about this, so it make it a little bit galaxy brained. But I've been thinking a lot about the work of preserving beauty, which is I think a kind of a small c. Conservative way to view the world. Understanding that I think a lot, for instance, about like the trees in the town where I live and how people are always trying to cut them down because they're inconvenient in some way. And I'm always hoping that nobody will cut the trees down because they're beautiful. And you know, it takes a really, really long time to grow a new one. You can't just like willy nilly destroy things. And I feel like there it takes so many people of my mindset to make a dent against the impulses of just one person who doesn't share that, who tends towards destruction or who wants to create ugliness. And so yeah, this is like the kind of big existential thing that I worry about. I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle against people who want to make the world ugly on purpose.

[Carol Markowitz]

Really? Well, why do they want to make it ugly on purpose? I believe you. I just, I'm trying to think what their motivations could be.

[Kat Rosenfield]

I mean, one of the things that I was really bizarrely distressed by was the peony vandalism that happened in Ann Arbor. Did you hear about this?

[Carol Markowitz]

No.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, somebody, they vandalized peonies. They went into this botanical garden where they have a spectacular peony bloom every year. And of course, you know, peonies are a short lived flower. So it was like, you know, a week or two out of the year where everything is just extravagantly in bloom and so beautiful. And it's. And it's so tenuous, this moment. And it was about to be that moment, the peonies had finally bloomed. And these people went in and they cut the heads off all of the peonies for Palestine.

[Carol Markowitz]

Oh man. I was gonna say Ann Arbor. Like that's really gross.

[Kat Rosenfield]

And they left these flyers all over the garden saying like, basically we ruined this beautiful thing because you don't deserve to think about beautiful things or enjoy beautiful things when somewhere in the world something bad is happening. And that's you Know, to me, an example of people who think they're, you know, they're making the world ugly for a good cause, so to speak. But. But I don't think it's a good thing to do. I think it's actually incredibly evil.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. How many Palestinians were freed because they cut off those peonies?

[Kat Rosenfield]

I'm gonna just go ahead and ballpark it at zero.

[Carol Markowitz]

Right. It's ridiculous. What a ridiculous thing to do. And I'm sorry for those flowers. That's a really interesting take. I really never thought about people making the world uglier for their variety of causes. You know, even if I agreed with the cause, I still would find that to be just repulsive and. And how dare you?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah. Yeah. I find it so nihilistic and so upsetting for that reason. It just feels like an incredible breach of the social contract.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah. What advice would you give your 16 year old self? Like, what does 16 year old cat need to know?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Ooh. You know, there are things that I might have wanted not to experience at that time in my life because they were painful. But on the other hand, they were incredibly formative, incredibly useful experiences. So I don't think that I would tell her anything except keep doing what you're doing.

[Carol Markowitz]

I like that because teenagers love to hear keep doing what you're doing. It's funny, a lot of people have a lot of things that they would tell their teenager to change because I think that they're maybe not even the people who are happy with how things turned out. They still think their teenager could have done a better job kind of getting them to that adulthood point. But it's interesting that you wouldn't want to change anything. Where, where did you grow up?

[Kat Rosenfield]

Upstate New York. A little town called Cook Saki.

[Carol Markowitz]

Okay. I don't know it. I know upstate pretty well, but not. Not there.

[Kat Rosenfield]

The joke that I always tell, the joke I always tell about Cook Saki is that unless you know somebody in prison or you are a dairy farmer.

[Carol Markowitz]

I know.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Not heard of it. Interesting.

[Carol Markowitz]

I actually know some prisons upstate, just not. Not near Kaki, I guess. Guess.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, that's there too. There that is. It is the part of upstate New York that's rural enough, but also, I guess, close enough to whatever necessary infrastructure that they do have correctional facilities up there.

[Carol Markowitz]

Well, I've loved this conversation. I've always thought your writing was so interesting and just unusual, and you're a fantastic writer, but I love the way you cover topics and I love the perspective that you have. Leave us here with your best tip for my listeners on how they can improve their lives.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Oh my goodness. I mean, I want to riff on the thing that I was previously saying and just encourage them to kind of make make things beautiful where they can. This has ended up being the most woo woo conversation. I've never had one like it.

[Carol Markowitz]

It's all right. We accept all here on the panel. Markowitz.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Yeah, I'm in a little bit of a weird woo woo place, but I, you know, I really want to encourage people to rediscover like kind of embodied and sensory pleasures, including, you know, making the space around them beautiful, including, you know, things like looking at beautiful art or, you know, experiencing the kind of tactile pleasures of the world. Like enjoy your food, smell the rose that you pass on your walk. Like go outside and take a walk, touch grass. Be normal.

[Carol Markowitz]

Yeah, be normal. Don't cut the peonies. She is Kat Rosenfield. Check her out at the Free Press and look for her new book, how to Survive in the woods, coming next spring. Thanks so much for coming on, Kat.

[Kat Rosenfield]

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Unknown]

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[Jacob Goldstein]

What if your top salesperson was a thousand times more efficient? And what if a limitless digital workforce helped your number one find lead a.

[Unknown]

Super team working 247 on their behalf.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Thinking, acting and solving complex tasks.

[Unknown]

So more deals closed.

[Jacob Goldstein]

What if with every sale, each customer felt like they were the only customer that would be one very efficient sales leader. Now imagine if every person on your team worked to the power of 1000.

[Unknown]

They can with AgentForce, the powerful AI.

[Jacob Goldstein]

From Salesforce from coast to coast.

[Cindy Crawford]

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[Carol Markowitz]

This is an iHeart podcast.