Cultivating a writing practice has never really been high on my to-do list. The longest thing I’ve ever written—5000ish words on techno for the New Yorker—was effectively written in a single overnight session in Florida. There was a paragraph I had to get out of my brain before I went to sleep one night, and I just kept typing and filed at 5:00am before passing out.
What I’m saying is that save for the odd fugue state, I don’t really write that much. This newsletter is a way of (maybe) rectifying that by forcing myself, and by extension all of you, to see what happens when I have a deadline and a cadence. The best way of explaining this whole thing is from Jay Caspian Kang’s essay on generative AI and his own experience as a writer from a few months ago:
I still believe that thoughtful, time-consuming journalism is the paragon of our industry, but, given my own peculiar beliefs about the writing process, I wondered if I might be better suited to being the type of writer who just writes all the time. I wasn’t convinced that I was getting enough plate appearances; I was being entirely too precious about what I thought was good or bad, and also far too narcissistic about my own ability to control the public’s reaction to my work.
So I’m going to try writing on a regular schedule. Once a week. Maybe 400 words. And it’ll go to all of you and hopefully some of you will like it and tell people you know who might also like it. Probably on Thursdays? Does Thursday sound ok to everyone? It’s going to be called:
IS IT SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT?
And the whole deal is that I’m going to write about things that we look at it and what that explains about our current cultural moment. There’ll also be some music suggestions, and probably a weekly fashion thing because I love clothes. Because that’s a really wide editorial remit let’s, uh, see what some topics would have been if I started this when I meant to like 3 months ago:
That room temperature superconductor thing and why we want to appear to be experts on everything.
Influencers renting sets that replicate the inside of airplanes to make fake videos about behavior that seems to be more common on real flights.
Scandoval and how reality show production creates a weird hall of mirrors for viewers.
People treating television shows like The Bear and Succession as something approaching tactile reality, and how marketing takes advantage of that. (I may honestly still write about this.)
The relationship between Barbie and The Haunted Mansion and why we continue making commercial objects into art. (I will probably write about this since Barbie is still in the zeitgeist.)
So yeah, more stuff like that. One big favor: If you’re into this idea and know some folks that would be interested in those sort of topics, it would be a lot to me if you forwarded this to your collection of likeminded internet weirdos. It would be even cooler if they subscribed. I don’t really have any intention of setting up a paid version of this, but I am very big into the idea of making this space more of a discussion and community.